


Everything Looks Beautiful (When You're Young and Pretty)

by blithers, Diaphenia, innie



Category: The Mindy Project
Genre: Alternate Universe - High School, F/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-31
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-03-20 15:42:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 60,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3655830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Diaphenia/pseuds/Diaphenia, https://archiveofourown.org/users/innie/pseuds/innie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Boys, BFFs, high school, homework, and Danny Castellano driving her crazy.  Yeah, Mindy is going to <em>crush</em> it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Freshman Year: Fall

**Author's Note:**

> This is a high-school AU of the first two seasons of _The Mindy Project_ as written by blithers and innie, and as betaed and improved in its entirety by Ghostcat. 
> 
> Each season translates to two high school years, and we're posting each year in two pieces. (Chapters 1, 2, and 6 by innie; Chapters 3, 4, and 5 by blithers.)
> 
> The kids attend (the fictional) East Park High School in Manhattan, and the school mascot is the Thunder.
> 
> Mindy's family speaks Tamil, and in the notes you'll find translations of Tamil words; translations are also provided in alt-text.  
> -CCD - after-school classes in Catholicism  
> -kondai - child (Tamil)  
> -pavadai - a full, silk skirt that a prepubescent girl would wear with a tight blouse that comes to the waist  
> -pallu - the decorated edge of a sari, the part thrown over the shoulder  
> -kurta - a men's top, usually with an upstanding collar and coming to the hips or mid-thigh  
> -thangam - gold [a term of endearment] (Tamil)
> 
> Title from the song "New York City" as done by They Might Be Giants.

"Who’s this girl, Tom?" Mindy asked, brushing the dust from the church's stone steps off her jeans. She wasn't going to jump to conclusions just because she'd seen him walk out of CCD with his arm around some random girl’s waist. There were lots of perfectly innocent reasons he might have done it – romantic comedies taught her that the heroine always had to get something totally wrong about the hero, and that he was a better guy than some of his actions might make him seem. So, maybe the girl had hurt her leg and Tom was helping her walk? No, the legs Mindy could see under the girl’s short and obviously not regulation plaid skirt were obviously fine. And thin. And white. 

Okay, so maybe the girl had had a skirt-related mishap, and it was only Tom's arm that kept it from falling down? No, there had been some definite ass-wiggling on skinny-girl’s part, so she couldn't have been worried about flashing the whole world. A-ha! Number one romantic-comedy misunderstanding, all the way back to Jane Austen: the girl was his sister! True, Mindy had never met her, but didn't all Catholics have like crazy large families? What was one extra sister here or there? Even if she did have – Mindy had to take a step back in horror – _serious_ dental issues.

Mindy smiled at Tom, just in time to hear him say, "I'm dating her now. She's my girlfriend."

It was like a record-scratch in her head. "You're dating this girl? _With the teeth_?" she screeched. Tom – beautiful, perfect Tom who she'd been planning to lay her first kiss on at the dance tomorrow night – stepped back, his eyes getting wide.

Ugh, she had to get out of there. She turned blindly and walked away from the church, of course crashing into Danny and Stevie – it was like she was in some weird Catholic version of pinball, the way all these idiots kept popping up just to get in her way – and pushed through.

"Hey!" one of them said. Whatever, like she wasn't in a crisis situation.

Of course she had no tissues on her, so she stopped at the Duane Reade around the corner and bought a pack and a magazine and settled onto a park bench for some cheap therapy. "Hey, Mindy," she heard, and she looked up to see Hot Cop Charlie, who'd moved in down the hall a couple of months ago, fueling a recurring fantasy about going to the laundry room with a basket of delicates and finding him in just his pants, like, hand-wringing his soapy shirts.

"Whoa, you okay?" he asked, which obviously meant she still had tears on her face.

She wiped her face with the last tissue in the pack. "Yeah, totally. Relationship drama," she said, waving it off, even though Charlie was all tall and handsome in his cop's uniform, because he had a hand on his nightstick like he could totally be down with some police brutality if she gave the word – with great power came great responsibility.

"'Relationship drama'? What're you, like ten?" Charlie asked. "Wait till you're my age for all of that garbage." He stopped leaning against the tree and went off on his rounds again.

Whatever. She was fourteen, and totally mature. She'd been taking _Cosmo_ quizzes for over a year now without laughing, except for that one time when her blood-sugar level had been totally whack.

*

"Gwen, please," Mindy said, waiting for Beverly to dump chicken fingers on a plate and hand it over. She could see Beverly taking the time to pick out the smallest, least-breaded chicken fingers and gave her the stinkeye while she waited to hear her BFF's response.

"Mindy, I can't. I finally got Carl to agree to take me to an R-rated movie tonight."

Ugh, being a senior had in no way made Carl Grandy any more of a catch. He was still that weird, serious guy who never cracked a smile and called Gwen by her full name all the time. Mindy shaped her hand, hovering above her totally unsatisfactory plate of chicken fingers, into an L. Gwen smacked her hand. "Don't."

"Fine, I won't. It's fine, nobody loves me. It's cool."

"I'm sorry about Tom, I really am," Gwen said when they found a table, shaking her peach iced tea. "Come over after school and help me decide what to wear?"

* * *

"Are you _serious_?" Mindy asked.

"Totally serious, Miss Lahiri," Mr. Shulman said. "And yes, I've seen that _Buffy_ episode, and there's nothing demonic about these eggs. Take a seat with Mr. Castellano."

"It's _Ms._ Lahiri," she said, just to get the last word in, and took an egg from the carton.

Danny was easy to spot, the only one sitting up straight instead of slumped over because of the Mondayness of it all. Of course, if he'd been slumped over, he'd be so small she probably would have missed him entirely. Dude was a shortass – only an inch taller than her, and she was nicely petite. She bet he prayed every night for a growth spurt.

"This is ridiculous," she said, sitting in the seat next to his with a huff.

"What, you don't want to be my partner?" he asked, and she looked at him, really looked for the first time since they'd graduated middle school. Definitely not tragic, maybe even cute, with those big eyes and long eyelashes. But he hardly ever smiled, and if she was, like, through osmosis or something, picking up Gwen's terrible taste in super-serious dweebs, then she needed to snap out of it and reverse the process.

"No," she said, and he sat back, looking away. "No, that's not what I meant. You're . . . fine." He nodded, his eyes down on his notebook, where he was doodling something. "I don't need a fake baby to take care of when we've got a real baby at home."

"You do?" He looked up suddenly, like he was interested, so she spilled.

"Yeah, Rishi. He was born _months_ ago, and I have _not_ had a good night's sleep since." Still, the little brat was pretty cute. He'd actually kicked excitedly when she'd tickled him, smiling up at her, and then, of course, he'd let loose with a monster crap that she had to deal with, cutting into her four-way call with Gwen and Alex and Maggie.

"It does get better," Danny said. "My little brother Richie's five now, but I remember all the stuff I had to do to get him to stop crying and go to sleep."

"Got any tips?" she asked, and he actually cracked a half-smile, but then Mr. Shulman finished pairing everyone off in boy/girl couples – heteronormative much? – and started class.

*

Danny followed her out of Health and into the cafeteria like a total stalker, holding their egg carefully. Didn't eggs go rotten and start to stink really quickly? Hopefully it would be at Danny's house when that happened.

"Do you wanna go over our schedules for this project?" he asked, picking up a tray and getting behind her in line. He made it sound like he didn't know where her locker was, like if she slipped out of his sight now, he'd never find her again, and he'd be left raising their egg as, like, some unshaven single dad.

"Seriously? Are you that worried about your grade in _Health_?" She scanned the options – ooh, sloppy joes. Beverly, thank god, was nowhere to be seen; maybe she was in the back, spitting in the next vat of ground meat. There was a big, weird-looking kid who was maybe 17 loitering behind the counter, half-wearing a hairnet and kind of lifting the serving spoons and watching food drip off them – maybe he was the substitute lunchlady? "Hey, man," she said, "could I get some of this sloppy-joe action?"

His eyes focused on her with a frankly unnerving intensity. "Of course you may." He bowed a little. "Morgan."

Maybe that was the proper greeting wherever he was from? "Morgan," she repeated solemnly.

"That's his name," Danny said from behind her, sounding like what he really wanted to say was that she was an idiot. "I'll have a sloppy joe too."

Morgan, already plating her lunch like he was on _Iron Chef_ , just nodded. He presented the plate – which was hot, how had he not burned his hands? – with a flourish. "For you, my queen."

"Thanks, man," she said. It was nice to be admired. She picked up an orange soda and turned to look for Gwen, but there was Danny, a can of root beer rolling around on his tray along with their egg, trying to sheepdog her toward a nearby table. She sighed. If only actual hotties were trying to corner her. "What, Danny?"

"It sounds like your nights are pretty full, so I'll take Junior after school, if you want." She looked up, surprised, and saw him already nodding in agreement _with himself_ like a total weirdo. "So you want to take him now?" His voice dipped but didn't quite crack in the middle of his question. Maybe that was why he didn't talk that much, because it sounded ridiculous.

She could deal with an egg during school hours, absolutely. And she could decorate it and make it a little silly-putty perch on her desk and go full-on domestic even if she hadn't wanted to take Home Ec, because, barf. Oh, and she could maybe use it as an excuse to get out of gym next period, if she could convince Mr. Lockley that she needed to keep a close eye on it. Who scheduled gym right after lunch, anyway? Sadists, that was who. "I do," she said, picking the egg off his tray. "Chloe will be happier with me anyway."

Danny's smile went away. " _Chloe_ Castellano? No way," he said, but she tuned him out and went to find Gwen.

* * *

"Did you guys hear?" Mindy asked, interrupting Maggie's story about how she'd broken her leg at soccer tryouts, and how much it sucked being on crutches when she should have been decimating the competition and earning a spot on the Olympic team. Like they hadn't all heard Maggie's story like a billion times by now – wasn't the season basically halfway over? Plus, Mindy could think of worse things she'd endure than a broken leg to get out of changing for gym in a locker room full of girls as pale and thin as Q-Tips.

"About Gwen?" Alex asked, looking up from giving Gwen a pedicure. Mindy silently vowed to help Gwen remove that brownish nail polish and go for something pinker. Why would anyone actually buy a shade called Montparnasse Mud?

"Wait, what about Gwen?" Mindy asked.

"Gwen's right here," Gwen said. "Carl asked me to Homecoming!"

"You're gonna need the best dress ever," Alex said.

"Gwen, that's awesome and all, but I have actual news, not just confirmation that Carl nadded up."

"Mindy!" Gwen protested, but couldn't keep herself from laughing. "Don't say that about Carl!"

"What's the news?" Maggie asked from the floor, where she was sprawled on some complicated arrangement of beanbag chairs that meant everyone else had to pile on her insanely soft bed that always sank in the middle.

"That guy, Morgan?" Mindy started.

"What guy?" Alex interrupted.

"The new lunchlady guy! It turns out he's working at East Park to get out of juvie!"

"What's juvie?" Gwen asked. She was _so_ naive.

"Like, _juvenile prison_!" Mindy looked around at her friends, not understanding why none of them got how huge this scoop was. "He was _stealing cars_!"

"Whoa!" Alex said. "Is he seeing anybody?"

"You," Maggie said dramatically, pointing a finger at Alex, "are a crazy person. There's no dating of felons on my watch! Mindy, you know she has a problem – why would you even tell her that?"

"So now I have to censor myself just because Alex likes bad boys?" Mindy protested.

"Just be smarter about what you say, like this," Maggie said. "Guys – did you hear the other news? There's a new guy, who just transferred in, and it's hard to understand him sometimes and he keeps calling it football, but he's awesome at soccer – like, maybe national squad good."

"I don't want to hear about a retarded guy," Alex said decisively. "Tell me more about the guy with the record."

"Come on, don't use that word," Gwen said. "You know I want to teach Special Ed, and that word is so demeaning."

"Mags just said he talks weird and can't remember the game is called soccer," Alex protested.

"Yeah, but if he's really good at it, maybe he's like Rain Man? Autistic, not retarded?" Mindy said, trying to focus on the positive. "Like, can he count all the balls on the court?"

"There's only one ball on the field!" Maggie shouted. "And he's British, not retarded!"

"'Mentally challenged' is the term –" Gwen started.

"Eh, same diff," Alex said, not spilling a drop of nail polish even when Gwen swatted at her. Mindy thought back to countless viewings of _Bridget Jones' Diary_ , remembered Colin Firth's smooth British voice, and thought she might need to investigate further.

* * *

Mindy would admit she'd had a pretty good run. Her parents were so wrapped up in Rishi that she could basically get away with murder, though the worst she did was stay at Gwen's an hour past curfew. She totally wasn't even hanging around the laundry room in hopes of catching Charlie in his skivvies, or pulling an Alex and getting a secret tattoo. But now, ugh, stuff her mom had volunteered for was suddenly becoming her problem, since Mom was still too worried about the kid's feeding schedule and weekly colds to leave him to fulfill her own obligations. Like the PTA wasn't going to notice that one of their volunteers was basically thirty years too young to be there, even if she was stuck in her ugly-ass granny glasses because her new contacts hadn't arrived yet.

"Mindy, honey, how is your mom, and that new baby?" Mrs. Riley asked, handing her a rake without even waiting for an answer, like, rude. "Okay, ladies, we're due at the high school at noon, so let's get this playground done." Like there wasn't an entire custodial staff that was paid to do things like rake and clean and garden, and Mindy groaned at the prospect of losing her whole morning to this volunteer nonsense. 

She made her way to the far edge of the elementary school's yard and started raking. It wasn't so bad, actually, though the rake was _ancient_ and only like half its claws hit the ground at any given time. Still, before too long, she had a pretty decent-sized pile of leaves near the little jungle gym and swing set. 

"An' I wanna go _high_ on the swings!" she heard a little voice saying, and then she saw a small boy, all curls and eyes, running ahead and tugging at someone's hand. Danny's hand. There was Danny, in a hooded navy-blue sweatshirt that looked even older than her rake, with some dumb sports logo mostly peeled off, looking at her in surprise.

"Hey, Mindy –" he started to say, before his brother dropped his hand and raced forward. "No, Richie, don't!" he said, but it was too late, because Richie Castellano had taken a flying leap and landed in the middle of her big pile of leaves, scattering them _everywhere_. Richie was giggling and rolling around, and Danny was looking at her with his mouth hanging open. "Sorry," he finally said, grabbing the rake out of her hand. "Richie, out," he said, his voice cracking in the middle of the order, but he was re-forming the pile a lot quicker than she had. "Richie," he warned, like their old-man principal saying he was going to count to three.

"It's fine, whatever," Mindy said, because Richie really was a cutie, and it wasn't like she hadn't jumped in leaf piles before. Danny's face had gone pink, either from the exertion or the cold, and she was standing close enough to him to see that his hair would be just as curly as his brother's if it got any longer. "Thanks," she said when he held the rake back out to her, but he didn't pick up on her attempts to civilize him; he just grunted something and led his brother over to the swings.

Way to be a Neanderthal, Castellano.

* * *

Gwen's dad never said no to _anything_ Gwen or her mom wanted, which was how Gwen ended up with the perfect dress for Homecoming, a pale-green sheath that made her look like Grace Kelly, while Mindy was stuck in the black-and-white polka-dotted thing with the poofy skirt that had been on the clearance rack and looked like it had been intended for some life-hating employee of Johnny Rockets. "You don't think Mags is really mad at me, do you?" she asked.

Gwen, armed with a hairbrush and heavy-duty Aqua Net, didn't even pause in her spraying and teasing of Mindy's hair. "That you got assigned to be Jeremy's East Park orientation guide and then you conned him into asking you to Homecoming by saying that it was a mandatory assignment? No, why would she be?"

"She's still on crutches!" Mindy protested. "It's not like she'd be able to dance with him anyway. If anything, I'm being an awesome wingwoman and scoping him out _for_ her."

"Really," Gwen said, smiling and bobby-pinning a white silk orchid in her hair, just over her left ear. "You're not excited to take tall, dark, and British to a dance."

"He's cute, right?"

"More Hugh Grant than Colin Firth," Gwen judged.

"Ugh, how does Hugh Grant even get enough food past those teeth to survive?" Mindy asked, then turned to fix Gwen's French twist, already coming out of its silver clips.

Mr. Riley came in while they were doing post-primp selfies, carrying his video camera – he still didn't get that there was a better one on his phone – and saying they looked beautiful. It sounded even better when Jeremy said the same thing in his suave accent and put a white-orchid corsage on her wrist. Poor Gwen – Carl just stood there like a lump, looking at her, and it took him two tries to get the pink-rosebud corsage around her wrist.

*

Ugh, it was seriously lame, having the _principal_ there to welcome all of them to Homecoming and announce that the East Park Thunder had won their game. The dance was the important thing, not some football game; really, if football was so great, why did there need to be cheerleaders to induce boners in all the gross old men? 

At least Jeremy looked slamming, and he even had a little bit of stubble going, so maybe he really was old for a freshman, but Mindy wasn't about to ask if he'd been held back and raise the whole question of whether he was retarded again. He didn't seem to get that he was supposed to ask her to dance, which pretty much settled the question in Mindy's mind, but he got her some party punch – that tasted like cherry and lime Kool-Aid mixed together, gross – and tried to make small talk, which was _entirely_ and _relentlessly_ about soccer. _Who cared?_

Mindy spent the time that he was babbling looking around and occasionally throwing an "mm-hmm" Jeremy's way; she recognized Mom's artistic touch in the decorations, and overall it looked like the PTA really stepped up its game for high-school events because there was no comparing the middle-school dances to this. Jeremy was saying something about the offside rule when she saw Gwen and Carl right in the middle of the dance floor, wrapped up tight in each other's arms, like they were in a private bubble, and really, was it too much to ask that she get to do the same with a hottie with a body?

Jeremy finally stopped with the verbal diarrhea and pulled it together for the random whiny oldie that was the last song the DJ played; Mindy swayed in his arms while he did that side-to-side shuffle that guys thought was a slow dance even though it just looked like they had to go to the bathroom. God, he smelled great.

"Ah, I love Eric Clapton," he said. "Do you want to hit the afterparty?"

" _Yes_ ," she said. Gwen would absolutely back her play on this, and Carl might finally come in handy and be able to use his advanced age to get them into whatever club it was. The night was turning into a dream.

A really weird dream, apparently, because the first thing she saw when they got into the club, which had been rented out by one of those totally snotty UES private schools where all the girls wore headbands and all the guys were basically Chuck Bass date-rapists in the making, was Danny in a sweat-soaked black button-down and jeans that clung to him, dirty-dancing with a tall blonde headband girl. She was wearing the most micro of all skirts, she had her bare thighs locked around one of his, and her arms were draped around his neck, her fingers up to play in his hair; Danny's hands were low on her hips and his own were moving fluidly, exactly in time with the pounding bass. Was he _kidding_ with this dance-floor prowess? _Danny Castellano_ moved like a jungle cat, and Mindy bit her tongue.

"Bold choice, polka dots," she heard someone say next to her, and she looked over to see a blond dude with little silver glasses giving her the elevator eyes. "You here with anyone?"

She scanned the crowd for Jeremy and found him talking to that weird girl, Betsy – she'd only been home-schooled before, which made her basically Lindsay Lohan circa _Mean Girls_ , only way less of a hot mess – who made her own clothes and had never worn jeans or a blouse without a Peter Pan collar. "No," she said, smiling at Mr. Abercrombie.

"I'm Josh."

"I'm Mindy. Over there, sucking face with her stupid boyfriend, that's Gwen."

"Very nice," Josh said, looking at Gwen for a long moment, "but like I said, I like the polka dots."

"You didn't say that," she corrected, liking the way his eyes widened behind those adorable glasses; it made her feel powerful and surprising, like he'd been expecting Beyoncé but had gotten Sasha Fierce. She was _so_ going to work this.

"I'm saying it now. Wanna grab a slice? You look like you'd rather be eating."

"Oh, uh," Mindy said, stalling for time. Gwen would _kill_ her for going off on her own with some rando, even if he was brutally hot. 

"Don't worry, I can get us right back in," Josh said. "I kind of run this place." 

"No, I can't." Stupid conscience. Stupid Gwen, who still hadn't even come up for air to appreciate her sacrifice. "Wait, you _run_ this place? The club?" Dude had to be _loaded_.

"Well, my dad does," he said with a dismissive little wave, cutting off her follow-up questions. "Let's hang here, then. The power of the polka dots compels me." 

Abercrombie was seriously, _seriously_ adorable. She smiled up at him, her skin tingling, and let him crowd her back to a dark corner, and then he put one hand on the wall next to her head and did the slow-motion Jordan Catalano lean, so she lifted her chin just like Gwen had taught her, and then she was being kissed. Correction – she was being _frenched_ like there was no tomorrow. She didn't really know what to do, but she must just have had natural kissing instincts, because Josh was totally going to town on her mouth, and he seemed to know and like what he was doing.

Homecoming was _awesome_.

*

Having a boyfriend was the absolute greatest. Josh sent the cutest texts when he was in study hall, which seemed to be basically every other period – Harbor Prep was clearly a weird place. 

Alex was obviously jealous of her for landing an out-of-bounds hottie and Maggie still wasn't really talking to her because of Jeremy; they said they didn't want to hear any more dramatic reenactments of Josh's texts or look at any more of the pictures of him on her phone. Gwen, meanwhile, only wanted to talk about the fact that Carl had told her that he loved her, so Mindy was reduced to reading the texts again during Health class and trying to get Danny's take on them.

"What are you doing?" he asked in his weird croaky whisper when she sneakily turned her phone on while one of Mr. Shulman's boring-ass filmstrips played – as if she needed infographics from the seventies to tell her that STDs were bad. 

"Duh, texting my boyfriend."

"You have a boyfriend?" Danny had the nerve to sound surprised, but maybe he'd been too Johnny Castle, all up in that skinny girl's business, to take a look and see love blooming across the dance floor.

"Yeah, he's tall and blond," she said, seizing the opportunity to do some quality snooping. "Totally my type. Is that your type too?" He still hadn't breathed one word about the queen bee he'd been grinding on the night of Homecoming, and they were sort of getting to be friends; he had no right to hold out on her.

"What?"

He played dumb really well, she'd give him that much. "Do you like –"

"Put that away," Danny said, all old-man disapproval, and she rolled her eyes at his fussiness. "Shulman'll confiscate it if he sees it." Like Shulman would do anything of the sort to her, especially since he'd given them an A+ on the egg project, almost definitely because of the awesome diary she'd written for Chloe Lahiri-Castellano. 

She sent a kissyface emoji to Josh and powered down the phone just so Danny wouldn't pitch a full-on fit while the girl in the filmstrip discovered the horrors of genital herpes.

* * *

Oh, god, what fresh hell was this? Mom had _way_ too much energy early in the morning, and she bustled in and dumped Rishi in the bed with a, "Take care of your brother." Ugh, did _no one_ get that she needed her beauty sleep? Rishi certainly didn't, cooing and crawling all over her and Brown Bear, and fine, he was being super-cute, but she was still totally charging her parents for this impromptu round of babysitting. 

Tossing Brown Bear to the side, Mindy rolled over on her back and plunked Rishi down on her chest. She kept one hand on his back and smoothed the other over her baby brother's soft hair, calming him down until his eyelids grew heavy and he tucked his big head into her neck. Peace at last, she thought, and settled in for another hour or two of sleep.

When she woke up and wandered out to the living room, probably looking like a child bride with Rishi on her hip, one of his fists knotted firmly in her nightie, the apartment was empty. Nice. Was it too much for them to ask her if she had any plans before assuming that she'd give up her entire weekend to watch over her brother? She might as well make the most of it. "Rish," she said, holding him up to look him straight in the eye, "today you're going to meet the residents of Seattle Grace." He blew a spit bubble at her, which she took for agreement.

She turned him away from the screen and covered his eyes when Meredith and Derek were naked on the floor, just in case, but soon his soft weight was settled on her lap, and it was nice, being curled up with him. 

Just when he was starting to get restless – right around the time George figured out what "007" meant – Mom walked back in, carrying at least four bags, all of which smelled like spices and incense, which meant that she'd gone to the Indian grocery. Mindy handed her Rishi, ignored the fact that Mom was stripping down right at the kitchen table to breastfeed him, and went through the bags. Ew, there were all the weird little silver-topped sweets and then pouch after pouch of savory mixture, and there was enough to feed an _army_. Did Mom not get that there was an occupancy limit to their apartment?

"Kondai," Mom said, finally doing the decent thing and heading into her room to feed Rishi, "look in my purse. I picked up a blouse for you."

A blouse? There, hanging from one of the kitchen chairs, was Mom's little woven crossbody bag, and inside Mindy found a small black square of folded fabric no bigger than a handkerchief. Her pavadai blouses were a lot bigger than that, but that was the only cloth in the purse. " _Mother?_ "

"You know you can't wear a pavadai now," Mom said before she could really ramp up to a satisfying rant. "You're a woman, not a child, and you'll be wearing a sari for the Diwali party."

Ugh, she'd forgotten the one drawback of finally getting her period was having it broadcast to the whole world by the fact that she was supposed to wear saris now, and it definitely wasn't like she wanted to be parading around in front of the entire South Indian population of Manhattan with her stomach hanging out. She'd just have to get Mom to do some judicious wrapping of the sari, because who knew why, but they didn't make Spanx you could wear with one.

*

It wasn't just Manhattan – every South Indian in the _tri-state area_ was crammed into their apartment, which was kind of good, because Mindy knew if she'd had the space to move a muscle, she'd have trod on the hem of her sari and had all those yards of silk unwind and fall to the floor in a heartbeat. And then she would have had to die. So this was good; she could just stand in the corner looking decorative in her new pink sari and Mom's Lakshmi chain and diamond earrings that dragged her earlobes down, and all she had to worry about was keeping her  pallu out of the flames from all the Diwali lamps.

She'd forgotten about the cheek-pinchers who came out of the woodwork for occasions like this, because Diwali only came once a year and it was all about the new clothes and pretty lights, and Mom and Dad didn't force her to do anything for any of the other seven hundred and fifty holidays in the Hindu calendar anyway.

Seriously, there was no way her parents actually knew this many people. After the fifth pinch of her cheek – it was always the old dudes who kissed their fingers after pinching her – and repetition of, "How is school? Are you at the top of your class?" Mindy decided to get smart. She squeezed her way over to Mom and took Rishi from her. Rishi, all sleepy-eyed and dressed up in his little embroidered kurta, was totally irresistible and had enough cheek to satisfy even the most insatiable pinchers.

She hauled him around until her arms grew tired, and then, to make up for throwing him to the wolves, she slipped into her bedroom and cuddled him until he was smiling his gummy smile at her.

* * *

"Mindy, you have to keep me away from Carl," Gwen said, with a totally straight face, like Mindy hadn't been trying to do that for, like, _forever_. "His midterm grades are the last ones that colleges see, and he really needs to study."

Carl was _such_ a drama queen. He was pulling straight A's and already had early admission to a couple of Ivys, so this was a little much. Still, more time with Gwen was never a bad thing, especially since Josh had said he'd be in San Antonio for all _four weeks_ of Harbor's winter break, visiting with his grandparents, like he could get any cuter.

"Want to study for Bio and watch _You've Got Mail_ tonight?" Mindy offered. "No, wait, I have to babysit tonight, my parents are going out. Do you want to come over anyway?"

"Yeah," Gwen said. "I'll bring over Korean. But we actually have to _study_ , not just have a movie marathon."

"Yeah, totally," Mindy said, with a wave of her hand, already anticipating the sizzling pork belly from the place near Gwen's. It wasn't like Bio was hard, and anyway she really wanted to pick Gwen's brain about what she should get Josh for Christmas. She absolutely had to keep babysitting if she was going to have enough money to cover all the gifts she had to buy.

*

"No, this is _horrifying_ ," Mindy said, covering her eyes. "I'm not ready to see Colin Firth as a dad! Take it out, take it out!" she squealed, her post-midterms high nearly extinguished.

"Alright, alright," Alex said, pressing the eject button on her DVD player. "I thought you'd like the movie, but I guess not. What do you want to watch instead?"

There was nothing in Alex's weird DVD collection that Mindy ever wanted to introduce her eyeballs to, not after Alex had tried to sneak _Sid and Nancy_ into the rom-com rotation.

"Or we could just talk," Maggie piped up, trying to wiggle her toes. Her cast had gone beyond grungy and was quite possibly the grossest thing around, but no one wanted to say anything. "About Jeremy. He's _so_ cute."

"He does clean up nice," Mindy admitted. She hadn't forgotten how suave he'd looked at Homecoming even if Josh had looked even better.

"Can he dance?" Maggie asked, a predatory gleam in her eye, and Mindy recognized that she was settling in for some Torquemada-style questioning.

"Not really," she said, "but it's kind of hard to remember. Maybe if you'd asked me the next day instead of holding a weird grudge for _six weeks_ , two of which I've spent cramming, I could've given you more detail."

"Mindy," Gwen said repressively, because she was always the mom of the group. "Come on, think back."

"Jeremy only asked me to dance once, and that was to a slow dance, and he was okay, I guess. Not like Carlton levels of tragic, but not doing anything special either. You know who can _really_ dance, though, is Danny."

"You never told me you danced with Danny!" Gwen said, looking up from the latest issue of _Bitch_.

"No, I didn't. I just saw him getting all Channing Tatum with some blonde with a negative body-mass index. See what you miss when you've got Carl's tongue down your throat?"

"Really?" Alex asked, scrunching up her nose. She'd raided Sephora on Black Friday and had every cosmetic in the world now, so she had a pretty good smoky eye going on her left eye. "Danny _Castellano_?"

"But _back_ to Jeremy. Spill, Lahiri. Leave _nothing_ out if you want to live," Maggie said, counting questions off on her fingers. "A, what did he smell like; B, what did he talk about; C, did he ask about me; D –"

"Hey, no more third degree," Gwen protested, then ducked the pillows they threw; it was easy for her to talk, when she had the guy she wanted to spend forever with planning the same thing in his mind. Even if _no one_ could figure out what exactly she saw in him.

*

"Dad," Mindy said, panting a little as she raced to keep up with him, "slow down a little!" She was excited to go skating with him, she really was, but it was _ungodly_ early and she hadn't exactly planned on being awake before noon at all over the break. 

"We have to be there early, if we want proper time on the ice," Dad said, like it wasn't the crack of dawn the day after Christmas. 

"I don't think there'll be lines _today_ ," she pointed out; all the WASPs would probably be nursing epic hangovers, and the Catholics would be on their knees again, some more. 

Dad just smiled at her and hugged her to his side. The burgundy scarf she'd bought him looked great on him, of course, but she knew he'd have worn it even if she'd had no eye for fashion. There were times when her parents were hard to beat. 

They were pretty much alone on the ice, and just doing loops around the Bryant Park rink made her smile. Dad held her hand while she tried a couple of spins, and she took a picture of him gliding along, glasses glinting in the early-morning light, that replaced yesterday's picture of Rishi, looking confused and adorable in the personalized Santa hat she'd made him, as the most recent one in her phone. She frowned, scrolling back, seeing how long it'd been since Josh had sent her a picture of himself. No texts or calls from him, either.

Skating up and stopping with that cool little spray of ice shavings he always managed, Dad said, "Thangam, shall we go home?"

"Yeah," she said, tucking her phone into her pocket, smiling because it seemed like forever since she'd heard him call her by her favorite pet name, "but one more loop first?"

* * *


	2. Freshman Year: Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone is back from Christmas break.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Only one note this time:
> 
> star birthday - the day within your (Hindu/lunar calendar) birth month that matches the position of the stars on the day you were actually born

Alex had gone to France over the break to visit her mom, and was explaining in _excruciating_ detail why a crèche was better than a Christmas tree, which was totally implausible, because a Christmas tree meant hours of fun decorating it, but you basically stuck a plastic doll in a crèche and you were done. Other than croissants and mousse and maybe the Eiffel Tower, what did the French really know about anything? 

Mindy dodged Alex's gesturing hands and scooped up a heaping spoonful of their shared frozen hot chocolate and whipped cream; she'd just slurped it up when her phone beeped. It was Josh, saying he was walking down from 63rd with a belated Christmas gift for her. She ditched Alex, who was kind of eyeing up the guy behind the counter, who had that nose-ring thing that made him look like a bull – which only worked if he was actually a Taurus – and walked outside, pretty much bumping into Josh while she was texting him back.

The first thing he said was, "Mmm, you taste like chocolate," which was hella romantic, so she frenched him again, getting his little glasses good and steamy and tasting Red Bull on his tongue.

"I got this for you," he said, pulling a little box out of his messenger bag. It was just the right size for jewelry, and suddenly the cashmere sweater she'd gotten him seemed totally inadequate, even though it had matched his eyes perfectly. He opened the box for her, slick as a salesman, and she gasped at the key pendant, sparkling with little stones. "It cost sixty dollars – the price went down, I guess."

"Oh, Josh," she said, paying no attention to his babbling – he was always talking about how much things cost – as he fastened the chain around her neck, his fingertips cool against the flushed heat of her nape. The key to his heart! Now _that_ was swoon-worthy, and she spent the rest of the day in a dreamy haze, humming through her geometry homework and even doing the laundry without complaint.

*

"It's not for me, it's for my friend," Mindy said for the fifth time, but Beverly continued to make that super-unattractive frowny-face, like there was such high demand for her so-called tacos. "She's on crutches, and she can't carry a tray. I have explained this, like, every third day for the past _four months_." She crossed her arms across her chest and tapped her foot, and Beverly's mean little eyes narrowed further.

When she finally got to the table with Maggie's lunch, Maggie had already cleared the tray she'd made for herself, and Alex was talking about auditioning for the spring musical. Mindy sighed and settled in, letting the conversation wash over her. "I figure most of the hardcore Gleeks are at LaGuardia anyway, so I've got a pretty good shot," Alex said, taking a long sip of her Coke Zero. Mindy shuddered to think that she shared a planet with people who seriously thought that Ryan Murphy was the best thing around to fixate on.

"Man, can you imagine the auditions they must have for their shows?" Maggie asked. "They'd all be like, 'I'll cut you, man! I will cut a bitch!'"

"Uh, yeah, this isn't soccer," Alex said. "Drama geeks aren't savages like you and Brandi Chastain. Anyway, you guys, I need moral support. Auditions are today after school."

"We'll be there," Mindy said, high-fiving Alex, which left her plate open for Maggie to steal her last taco. "Seriously, are they not feeding you at home?"

*

Alex _nailed_ her audition with some operatic solo, which was only fair, considering what her dad was paying for voice lessons from some wannabe from Tisch who lived entirely on Jamba Juices. 

"Whoo!" Mindy cheered from the back of the auditorium, and Maggie, her cast propped up on the seat in front of her, did an ironic Arsenio arm-pump and the accompanying bark. Even Gwen loosened up enough to give her a standing ovation. Alex was clearly made for the stage.

"Who is that?" a voice said, and Mindy saw Principal Menken bearing down on them. What was the principal doing at auditions? And was that Mr. Shulman up near the stage, talking to Alex?

"What's he doing here? He teaches _Health_."

"And he is the advisor for the spring musical, as he is a patron of the arts. As am I," Principal Menken said.

"Oh, Mindy?" Shulman said, beckoning her forward. "Now that we've ascertained that your voice carries the length of the auditorium, let's just make it official. Come on up and audition."

What the hell – she had her friends there, Josh's key as a good-luck charm, and her mother's assurance that she'd been born for the world's attention, as if being dramatic was somehow _bad_.

*

"Ms. Lahiri," Mr. Shulman said after the bell rang and the class started stampeding out, "may I speak with you for a moment?" He sounded so serious, his usual hippy-dippy smile gone.

Danny, who'd been mumbling something to her about Morgan the lunchlady for some reason, fell silent and slung his backpack slowly over his shoulder. She shot him a look, though to be totally fair, she had no idea what she expected him to do about the fact that she was clearly in trouble. Shulman had spent the entire period going all _Dead Poets Society_ – without providing any of the eye-candy the movie had had in spades – and talking about how they needed to take chances and find all the pathways of their potential; how that related to Health she couldn't begin to guess, and now it was clear that he had come unhinged.

"I'm innocent!" she said preemptively; it was important to establish these things from the start. "Danny will vouch for me."

"Yeah," he said, nodding, and she turned to smile at him, because she really hadn't expected him to back her play like that.

"It's nothing like that," Shulman said. "I simply wanted to gauge your interest in participating in the spring musical. I know you weren't prepared to audition, but your rendition of the _Gilligan's Island_ theme was both inspired and rousing, and we could use your individual talents."

"I got in?" she squealed. "That's awesome – of course I'll be in it!" Behind her, she could hear Danny shuffling past.

"Mr. Castellano," Shulman said, and the shuffling stopped. "I hope you were paying close attention today. I was directing my words at the two of you particularly." Mindy darted a glance behind her and saw Danny looking just as confused as she felt. "The two of you have tremendous potential, and I think you could succeed at just about anything. It never hurts to be told that. As an educator, my job is to inspire." Shulman stood up and put his hands together like he was praying. If he said _namaste_ , she was out of there. "Go, dazzle the world!"

She didn't dare meet Danny's eye, but went along with it when he pulled her down some random hall toward a door that was clearly marked Emergency Exit; she braced for the wails of an alarm, but Danny, the little juvenile delinquent, apparently knew that nothing would happen because he pushed the door open, revealing a little vestibule, and started to laugh irresistibly, triggering her too.

"What was _that_?" he asked finally. "Do we have untapped potential?" 

"We did only get an A+ for our egg, not an A++++, like, you know, in –"

" _A Christmas Story_ ," he said along with her, and then smiled again. "I guess he thinks you could be more dazzling."

"Hey! You don't dazzle at _all_ ," she said, because she at least thought about what she was wearing – hence her slamming outfit and accessories – and he'd just thrown on faded blue jeans and a plain white t-shirt and his stupid cheapo watch that their math teacher back in middle school, Mr. Hiller, always made him remove before tests because it doubled as a calculator. "And now I'm late," she continued when the tardy bell rang.

"For lunch," he reminded her, like he thought he was being helpful, as if she might have forgotten the schedule she'd been following for months.

Whatever. "Yeah, but it's my turn to get Maggie's tray."

"Yeah, what happened to her?" Danny asked, settling back against the wall, one foot braced against it, like she hadn't _just_ said she was late. 

"Something at soccer tryouts," Mindy said. "That's why I don't play sports."

"Right, that's why," he said, but not meanly; he still had traces of a smile on his face.

"I'll have you know I am _awesome_ at double-dutch. I've got _game_ , son."

"Jumping rope is not a sport; it's a warm-up," he said, pushing off the wall and heading back down their secret hall.

"What about you, big shot?" she challenged. "I don't see you in a letterman jacket."

"Baseball tryouts are today," he said. "That's my game."

"How very all-American of you." He slowed down, like he was trying to figure out how to take that, and she sighed. "Whatever. Just – good luck." He should have dressed warmer today; there was still snow on the ground.

"Yeah, thanks," he said as they entered the cafeteria, and he went over to his friends' table while she prepared to do battle again with Beverly.

*

Alex fist-pumped when Shulman announced that the spring musical was going to be _Guys and Dolls_ and clutched her hand while pressing forward with everyone else to take a look at the cast list he'd just posted. 

Mindy saw her name and, next to it, a line that said, "Miss Adelaide (understudy)," which made it sound like she was going to be playing someone's hundred-year-old southern grandma; she narrowed her eyes at Shulman, who was passing out scripts. Alex's name had "Sarah Brown (understudy)" next to it, so they were in the same boat. Mindy picked up her script from Shulman, who smiled innocently at her, and then waited for Alex to get hers. It took forever – Shulman had some words of wisdom just for Alex, apparently – so she started flipping through the script. She perked up as she read, because Miss Adelaide was _awesome_ , a burlesque dancer with a long-standing engagement, who got to be funny, too. Maybe Shulman really had meant all those nice things he'd said about her potential.

Alex came up, grabbed her arm, and marched her down the hall. "What?" Mindy asked, feeling like a perp being hustled along on _Cops_.

"Shulman just told me that I was way better than Katie Kidman, but since she's a senior, she got the part of Sarah. All the seniors who auditioned got cast. But he also told me that he wants to do one performance with just the understudies, so we'll get a shot on stage."

Ha! Mindy knew she'd be a better Adelaide than Sheila Hamilton any day of the week. "Bring it on," she said. "We are totally going to rock this."

"Also," Alex said, "don't let this get between you and Mags again."

"Wait, what?"

"Jeremy's the understudy for Nathan Detroit, your fiancé." Seriously, her life was like a soap opera sometimes. But she was as pure of heart as any Meg Ryan character, so it would all work out okay.

* * *

Dating someone at another school was inconvenient – she got no little smooch-sessions between classes or at their lockers to buck her up when she was having a long day – but she was getting really good at finishing her homework within a couple of hours so that she'd still have time for Josh afterwards. And now she had rehearsals to fit into all of that. She'd just finished drawing the stages of mitosis when her phone beeped; she wasn't due on stage for another twenty minutes, so she took Josh's call, pressing her fingertips to her key pendant.

"Hey, sexy," he said. "How would you feel about being the guest of honor at my Valentine's Day party?"

She squeaked; she couldn't help it. Then she pinched herself – ow – but nothing changed, so she had to have heard him right. God, Josh was just the absolute greatest.

"Yeah, that'd be okay," she said, all demure, but she couldn't keep her cool when he started laughing at her.

"Just okay? I'll have to work on that."

"When and where?" she asked, trying to figure out if anything in her closet was worthy of this momentous occasion.

"Deets will be texted, babe," he said. "Gotta go."

Mindy squirmed with pleasure and blew a kiss into the phone. Alex and Katie were doing their lines as Sarah side by side, playing to Greg Edmonds and Brendan Deslaurier, who were playing Sky Masterson, and Alex was blowing Katie out of the water. She couldn't tell if Brendan, that weird, granola jerk, was actually better than Greg, or if acting with Alex was upping his game, but either way, he was doing more than okay. Score another one for the freshmen.

*

"My legs look so weird," Maggie said again, her back on her bed and her legs going straight up the wall so that they could all see what she was talking about now that her repulsive cast was finally off. "They're all uneven now, look!"

So there was a slight differentiation in muscle tone and skin pigmentation. "My legs look like they belong to a totally different person than my arms," Mindy said, because life was tough for all of them. "They're like fifty shades whiter. It's spooky."

"I'll never be able to play again," Maggie moaned melodramatically, and Gwen, sitting next to her, pulled her head into her lap and stroked her hair. 

"Sure you will," Gwen said. "All athletes get injured, but they train hard and they come back."

"Yeah, plus athletes are _hot_ ," Alex said. "Show me a guy in eye-black, and I'll show you a guy who can have my number."

"Everybody already has your number, Alex," Maggie said, rolling her eyes, which looked really weird upside-down.

"Who is it this time?" Mindy asked, curious. When had Alex found the time to scope out any new guys? Unless it was some college dude that her doofus brother Darryl had brought home at some point.

"Colin," Alex said. "I went by the gym after rehearsal the other day to catch the end of baseball practice, and he was looking _fine_."

Growth spurt notwithstanding, there was no way Colin Pizzaface Kee was looking anything close to fine. "Really?"

"Dude knows how to swing a bat," Alex said, shrugging her shoulders. "It's all in the hips." She looked up to find them all looking incredulously at her. "What? Come to the practice with me tomorrow and you'll see."

*

Josh's Valentine's party was in the absolutely _sick_ basement lounge at the Gramercy Marcel, and Mindy couldn't quite believe she was in the right place. "Whoa," she said under her breath, looking at all the glamorous people in the little shadowy VIP caves the lounge was divided into, and then there was Josh, beaming at her like her own personal sun.

"Hey, you made it!" he said, and pushed her up against a wall to french her like nobody's business. "You look hot," he said, his mouth wearing her lipstick. "Good thing, cause this is gonna be the night of your life."

Good, because she had better not have lied to her parents about sleeping over at Gwen's for nothing.

"Champagne?" Josh asked, handing her a flute. 

"No, thanks," she said firmly. She wasn't going to start drinking here when she hadn't even done it with the girls to keep an eye on her. "I'll just have a Coke."

"It's not like you need the sugar to keep you sweet," Josh coaxed, but she got him to drop it by kissing him again, and his cool hands traced along her bare arms and back. Man, he was really good at that.

She followed him to a big table and sat down next to some randos, leaving him the space at the edge so his long legs wouldn't have to be crammed under the table all night. Scooching across the seat, she was surprised to see a familiar leggy blonde across the table, pressed up between a couple of big guys. "Hey, I know you," Mindy said before she could think about it. "You're the one who was dancing with Danny back at Homecoming."

The girl looked over at her with disinterested eyes. "Yeah. Why, you want him?"

"What? No! I'm with Josh." Duh, that had to be obvious, given that she was pretty much on Josh's lap, she was sitting so close. How dumb was this girl?

The blonde raised an eyebrow like that was news to her, then shrugged. "Tell Danny Christina says hi, if he ever mans up," she said, then gave the guy to her left a kiss that looked hard enough to hurt.

Mindy leaned back against Josh, wishing it was just the two of them and she didn't have to see that meathead's hand go up Christina's itty-bitty shirt. But Josh kept his hand in hers under the table while he was talking across her to some dude, and then the waitress brought over chocolate fondue, and there was romantic-ballad karaoke, so things weren't all bad.

She was trying to decide what duet she and Josh should sing – it'd be good practice for the play – when someone plunked a bottle down sideways on the big round table and shouted, "Spin the bottle!"

Was that still a thing? Mindy looked around and thought she'd rather go through another round of menstrual cramps than kiss anybody at the table besides Josh. Christina barely looked up from her grope partner to say, "You go first, Josh." Josh laughed and spun, and when the bottle came to a stop it pointed to the edge of the table, the one place where nobody was sitting.

Mindy exhaled, relieved, but a redhead stepped up to fill that space and said, "Miss me, Josh?" She pulled Josh up to his feet and laid a wet one on him. Mindy waited for him to push her off, or duck out of the kiss, or _anything_ , but he gave it back as good as he got. They looked like they were used to doing this together, and neither one of them was coming up for air any time soon. Josh's hands were easy on the girl, getting past her hemline and onto her skin, totally familiar and assured. There was a glint of light reflecting off something on the redhead's chest, and Mindy saw, the knot in her stomach tightening, that it was a sparklier version of the key pendant she wore around her own neck.

She had to get out of there. "Excuse me," she said, pushing past them, desperate to be alone. She walked, blinded by tears, and found herself in front of Gwen's building, her feet blistered and aching.

Gwen cemented her BFF status with emergency New York Super Fudge Chunk, a fresh box of those really soft tissues with lotion in them, and a hug that lasted as long as _Some Kind of Wonderful_.

*

By the time she woke up in the morning, Gwen had already stolen her phone, saying that she was being saved despite herself from answering any of Josh's calls or texts and that Alex and Mags were prepared to back her up. Mindy knew she should have been more grateful for her friends' vigilance, but it was killing her, not knowing what he might be saying, what explanation there could be. Maybe that girl was a psycho ex, or maybe she was sick and he was her Make-a-Wish makeout wish, or . . . something. Why wasn't she good enough for him, all on her own?

The last person she wanted to talk to was Danny, now that she'd met his maybe-ex, but of course he leaned over while they were doing a worksheet in Health to ask where her phone was. "It's actually distracting now _not_ to see you tapping away at that thing under the desk like you think no one can see you," he teased in his crackly voice. She looked up at him at that, assessing him; he wasn't a total dreamboat hottie like Josh, but he probably had enough Catholic guilt racked up not to two-time anybody. He had kind of a nice face.

"I'm not getting my phone back until Josh stops texting me to try to explain why he cheated on me," she blurted out, and Danny blinked, his eyelids stuttering like she'd slapped him.

"He _cheated_ on you?" he asked, managing to shout even in a whisper. "What an asshole!" She could feel a couple of people looking their way, but he kept his eyes fixed on her face. "Alright," he said, after chewing his lip, "come with me after class. I know something that'll cheer you up." His accent got markedly more Staten Island when he was agitated, which was funny because he'd been in Manhattan for a couple of years now; she hardly remembered what middle school had been like before he was in all of her classes, competing with her for the top academic ranking and generally being a huge pain in the butt.

"Is it a time machine?" she asked, surprising a smile out of him. "Cause I'd really like to go back and smack him before he ever got a chance to lay a finger on me."

"Trust me, it's better," he said, then tapped her worksheet with the eraser end of his pencil. "Come on, let's finish this up and keep racking up those A-pluses."

*

She wasn't all that surprised that Danny took her down that same weirdly empty hallway they'd gone down last time, only this time he pushed open the second door too, which put them outside where it was _freezing_. Of course it was – it was Manhattan in February – and she was wearing her nice big wallowing sweater, but he just had a waffled grey henley on. "Don't catch pneumonia just to cheer me up," she said.

"Would me getting sick cheer you up?" he asked, looking back over his shoulder, quirking a smile at her. "Tough luck, I never get sick."

"Okay, whatever, stop bragging," she said, wondering why she was still following him as he snuck around the perimeter of the building. Just then he stopped at a little alcove, shielded from the elements, where there was a pile of blankets and a bottle of water. Was there a homeless person living on school grounds? How would _that_ cheer her up?

"Close your eyes and hold out your arms," Danny said, crouching down and reaching a hand out toward the blankets. Yeah, like that was gonna happen. "Come on," he said, not even turning around to verify that she hadn't done what he asked, like he had dad-eyes in the back of his head. "Trust me, it'll be worth it."

"Fine," she said, "but only because it's freezing out here and I don't want to keel over."

The next thing she knew, something warm and wriggly was in her outstretched arms, and she looked down to see a little brown-and-white puppy with big brown eyes panting happily up at her. "Danny –" she said, then didn't know what else she even wanted to say.

"He's Morgan's. Morgan's been raising him in secret out here, feeding him scraps from the kitchen." Danny was stroking the dog's head, and the puppy wiggled in complete bliss. "Hey, buddy," Danny said quietly into one of the puppy's floppy, silky ears, and the puppy leaned forward to lick his cheek. "Alright, that's enough excitement for one day," he said, and took the puppy from her, brushing her boobs with _both hands_. He went totally red and it looked like he was trying to swallow his Adam's apple.

As fun as it would have been to say something about his smooth moves – Americans _did too_ get irony, _Jeremy_ – Mindy was just gonna let that go, because it had clearly been an accident. Danny seemed to realize that after a long awkward moment, and started to crouch back down. "Wait," she said, and he paused, both arms full of wriggly pup and his ears still crimson, and waited for her to pull off the key necklace and loop it around the dog's neck. Danny knelt and put him back in his blanket-draped cage.

"Hey, Danny," she said, putting her hand on his arm when he stood back up. "Thanks. I did need that." He'd done something nice for her, and she was in a position to reciprocate. "I ran into your . . . friend . . . Christina, and she said to say hello."

And now he looked like she'd kicked him square in the chest, so her instincts had been right and that dull-eyed bitch was totally bad news. "We were never friends," he said, stepping back, away from the shelter of the building. The wind kicked up, and he was shivering, his hair tousled, and she could see his breath in the air when he spoke. "I wasn't –" He stopped, toed at the ground, and then shook his head. "I'm going back inside."

Mindy watched him go, shoulders hunched forward, and wanted to kick herself. No, actually, she still wanted to kick Josh. She didn't want a time machine; she wanted the superpower to zap right to him, deliver a righteous kick in the balls, and zap back to her friends, who'd be standing by with, like, pompoms and pudding cups.

* * *

The sets that were going up were seriously impressive, Tragically-Homeschooled Betsy was _killing it_ as wardrobe-mistress, and rehearsals for _Guys and Dolls_ were getting more intense. Mindy had been borrowing what she could remember of Danny's Staten Island accent for Miss Adelaide – the YouTube videos she'd seen of various performances all had Adelaides with thick accents – but Jeremy could not stop sounding British, even when he was playing a born-and-bred New York wiseguy. That said, he was still pretty damn charming, and his wardrobe of tight suits made him look even longer and leaner. She could maybe see how Maggie was still obsessed with the guy, and resolved to help them out. If anyone deserved to be bored by Jeremy's talk about soccer, it was Mags.

"Adelaides, front and center," Shulman called, and Mindy trotted off to take the stage next to Sheila. Adelaide didn't have to do much proper singing, just a lot of talk-singing, which was good because she could act her way through that. " _I love you, a bushel and a peck, a bushel and a peck, and a hug around the neck,_ " they chanted in unison while they did a toned-down version of Miss Adelaide's Hot Box dance. Seriously, there were feather boas, which she'd always thought were pretty sexy, but in their G-rated version, there were enough boas to mummify both of them. Mindy was used to picturing Josh in the audience and playing to him, but now she had to figure something else out. Channing Tatum, maybe, buff arms crossed over that massive chest, sprawled in one of the auditorium seats and giving her the smoldering eyes. Yeah, that would work nicely.

"Gang," Shulman said at the end of the rehearsal, making notes on his ever-present clipboard, "an announcement: Principal Menken's allowing us to give a performance for your classmates the Friday before spring break starts, which is four weeks from now. We're going to have a half-day of classes and then an assembly featuring the understudies. Those of you in the main cast should take the opportunity to finalize your performances, which will start the Monday we're back from break." Shulman was beaming at them with a big sappy smile; it looked like he was close to getting them all into a sharing circle or group hug with Brendan Deslaurier as his willing hippie accomplice, so Mindy took a discreet step back. " _Learn_ from each other. _Grow._ " 

Screw the main cast, the freshmen had it going on. Mindy looked past Jeremy and Brendan to see Alex, her face totally lit up, and knew they were going to absolutely _rock_.

*

"What do you mean, you have a secret cunning plan?" Mindy asked, quietly, just in case Mags really was crazy and all the groundwork she was laying with Jeremy on her behalf would have to be shut down. She looked around the classroom with all of the yearbook staff silently working away under Mr. Gilpin's gimlet eye, relieved that no one had looked up with a suspicious frown.

"So after I broke my leg, I needed some kind of activity or I was gonna go crazy," Mags said, still sorting through a huge box of black-and-white photographs. "Gwen said yearbook was fun –"

"Gwen thinks pep rallies are fun," Alex pointed out.

"Hey!" Gwen said. "I just like being able to hold hands with my boyfriend in school without any commentary from the peanut gallery."

"Yeah, okay," Alex said.

"And anyway, you do, too!" Gwen protested. "You like ogling all the athletes."

"Touché."

"– and I thought, I know, I can get on the staff and then apply a rigorous screening process to the photographs that make the cut," Maggie continued, like she hadn't even noticed an interruption.

"What's the process?" Mindy asked, crossing her fingers that Maggie would actually make some sense.

"Basically us and cute boys get in. People who wilfully break other people's legs and deprive them of an entire season of soccer do not."

"Sounds fair." Maybe putting a picture of Jeremy on every page of the yearbook would be enough to satisfy Mags, and she'd stop trying to drop weird British slang into totally normal conversations; Mindy was pretty sure that just saying "lift" and "lorry" wasn't going to be enough to enchant Jeremy.

"Well, we'll leave you to it," Alex said. "Mindy and I are going to go watch the JV baseball game to recharge and then rehearse some more."

"Whoo," Mindy said unenthusiastically while Maggie made kissy noises at Alex. Baseball was so _boring_ , and there was no way Colin Kee was worth all of this, no matter what his hips did or how much eye-black he smeared under his lashes.

*

Morgan was at the game, unconvincingly holding a clipboard and mimicking Mr. Lockley's coaching stance, and Mindy could see a small lump moving inside his jacket that had to be the friendly puppy Danny had introduced her to. She scanned the field for Danny, wondering if he might be the one all the way near the fence, but then there was a sharp crack as the bat connected with the ball, and she recognized him by the way he moved, running forward to scoop the ball up with his ungloved hand and throw it toward the dude with a foot on first base. She should have just looked for his stupid watch, because he was the only one out there wearing one, like his spirit animal was some Florida old-timer sitting down to an early-bird dinner.

"So Danny's in the hot corner," Alex said, like that was supposed to mean something. "Good hands, Castellano." Alex took her sports commentary seriously, even if she didn't play anything herself, and Mindy always wanted to ask if she even heard the double entendres that seemed to make up most of what the announcers said, or at least that was what she'd found every time she'd been roped into watching a game with Alex just to get a glimpse of six-pack abs or a tight little butt.

"Where's Colin?" Mindy asked, trying to get into it, because even this beat conjugating irregular verbs _again_. Didn't the French language have to run out of them at some point? She flat-out refused to believe that there were people who could actually speak that stupid language without having conjugation cheat-sheets basically tattooed on their skin.

"Right next to him at shortstop," Alex said, pointing like it didn't matter who saw her.

"Ha, you'd think that's the job Danny would have tried out for instead of third base," Mindy cracked, because seeing him next to all of his teammates made him look small in a way he never seemed when they were sitting side by side in a classroom, but Alex took that as an invitation to explain all of the positions on the field in great detail. Alex, Mindy reminded herself, trying to be patient, actually played video games for fun; having an older brother had clearly skewed her priorities. 

Things got more exciting when East Park was up at bat. Danny managed to connect on one of his pitches, and Colin got him onto third base, but then the inning was over. There was a sound behind them like one of those godawful vuvuzelas she and Mom had had to put up with when Dad was obsessively watching the World Cup last summer, probably scarring Rishi in utero; she turned and saw that super-skinny kid, Parker, wearing dark-blue jeans and a bright orange shirt with cotton balls taped to it, waving a lightning-bolt in one hand and bringing a kazoo back up to his lips.

"Hey, Parker!" she said, beckoning him over.

"Hey, Mindy," he said, grinning and squinting up at her like the weak March sun was too much for his watery eyes. "What's up?"

"No, that's my question for you," Mindy said. "What are you _doing_?"

"There's already a mascot for the varsity team, so I'm the JV mascot," he said, like that explained everything. 

"And why do you need to be a mascot at all?" Boys were so odd.

"I've found that people are much less likely to stuff their own mascot into a locker," he said matter-of-factly. "And it's nice to be part of the jocks' club, you know?"

That was so sad. Even she was probably more athletic than this kid, who must weigh about ninety pounds. Ninety easily foldable pounds, if his stuffed-in-a-locker story was true, which it had to be, because who would make that up? "Yeah," she said, seeing that he'd actually tried to make the cotton balls grey and that the lightning-bolt was made of cardboard but jazzed up with gold glitter, "I can see it. You're an awesome Thunder."

He brightened, almost succeeding in not being totally washed out by his shirt. Who exactly had decided that East Park would best be represented by fluorescent orange and totally blah navy? "Thanks!"

"But shouldn't you be mascoting in front of the bleachers, not behind?" she asked.

"Oh, not till I get the routine just right!" he said, and ran off, tooting a little on his kazoo and butchering the "Charge" rhythm. Poor, doomed kid.

* * *

Sharing a birthday with St. Patrick's Day meant that she always had to wear something green, even if it was crystal clear that she was not even a tiny bit Irish, and the new earrings and bracelet her parents got her were gorgeous. The stripy toe-socks "from Rishi" were just an added rainbow bonus.

She'd never really appreciated the tradition of pinching anyone who wasn't wearing green until she saw Jeremy, trying to be all dapper in his show suit and fedora, leaning casually against a wall. She pinched his little ass but good, relishing his injured howl and his extended rant about not being a barbarian but a proper Englishman who was not about to kowtow to all the bloody colonialists' rules. "And furthermore," he said, winding up to his big finish and really projecting his voice in the way Shulman had been trying to get him to do for weeks, so kudos to him, "I am actually wearing green pants!" He defiantly unzipped enough to show off green plaid boxers but then blushed and seemed to realize what he was doing when Sheila and Katie wolf-whistled, and hurriedly zipped back up. 

Mindy gave him a round of applause and, with Alex's assistance, acted it out for Maggie's benefit when her friends took her out to her favorite diner for her birthday dinner. Alex was a fantastic mimic and got all of Jeremy's indignant squeaks just right, and Mindy laughed until she choked. Mags was giggling and testing out her own terrible British accent, which sounded nothing like Jeremy but maybe a little like Dobby the House-Elf. None of them could figure out why he'd said "pants" when he meant underwear, but they toasted Jeremy's fine ass with their milkshakes anyway.

*

Being dragged by Alex to some of the JV baseball games had one benefit beyond getting to bask in the sunshine next to one of her best friends, and that was getting to hear the source for her Adelaide accent loud and clear; Danny was much more proper when they were in a classroom, even Shulman's, but once he was out on the diamond or in the dugout, he let his Staten flag fly. Mr. Lockley kept hollering for "more chatter, more chatter," which seemed impossible to Mindy, given that all of the guys on the team kept jawing away and saying completely incomprehensible stuff, but it was easy to pick out Danny's voice among the rest.

The game still made zero sense to her. Watching the action was like watching ants scurrying around an anthill – ants in _tight_ pants, and maybe she could admit that Alex had been right about their hips – in that she could tell _they_ knew what they were doing and had some sort of larger pattern going, but she had no clue how to decipher it. Morgan had climbed up to sit next to her and kept coaching even though he was really only the equipment manager, according to the sign he'd made and pinned to his trucker hat. At least Alex wasn't still interested in him – athletes trumped criminals, apparently – which was the one saving grace of being squashed between the two of them.

"Home run!" Morgan kept shouting, even between batters while Alex side-eyed him and said unintelligible things like _play in_ and _don't crowd the plate_. Mindy hunched down, stacking her arms on her knees and resting her chin on her arm, and let their words add to the noise swirling above her.

All of the cacophony, from the sounds of the players' chatter to Alex shouting encouragement, from Morgan shouting even louder encouragement to Parker's damn kazoo, died with one collective gasp when the ball smacked Danny right in the face. 

He lay sprawled in the dirt and _not moving_ , and that middle-school girl who was totally stalking him started wailing like she was the one who'd been injured. Mindy shot her an irritated look and tried to free herself from the iron grips of Alex and Morgan, who'd each grabbed one of her arms. "D'you think he'll be okay? He's gotta be okay, brave little guy! Danny's my best friend! Well, my best human friend, because Bones is my best best friend." Morgan was saying without pausing for breath, and Alex kept repeating, "It didn't _look_ like a hopper," like that would make the whole thing not have happened.

Danny sat up all of a sudden and shook his head, then cupped a hand over his eye. If that idiot girl would only stop sobbing, it'd be easier to hear what he was saying to Mr. Lockley, crouched next to him with a hand on his shoulder. Mr. Lockley hauled Danny up by the hand and sent him to the dugout where Mindy couldn't see him at all. Ugh, baseball was the worst sport _ever_.

*

Even with a dark bruise along one cheekbone that had to hurt like a mother, Danny smiled like he was feeling no pain – maybe he was high off some painkiller? – when she dropped a package of Big League Chew on his desk and said, "Hey, Slugger."

"What're you – thanks," he said, dropping the pouch in his backpack, a little fumbly, so maybe her painkiller theory was right on.

"I figured you probably already got all the flowers you could stand from your little stalker," she said, and he looked up at her with a confused expression. "You know, the girl who comes to all of your games and cheers every time you're batting? Long brown ponytail?"

"Oh, that's Jillian," he said. "Our little brothers are in the same kindergarten class. Wait, why would she give me flowers?"

Boys were so stupid sometimes. "Because – never mind. I'm just glad that that baseball didn't put you out of commission."

He frowned, looking even more baffled than before. He really was a dummy. "It's one ground ball to the face. It happens."

"Whatever, tough guy," she said, flipping open her workbook and doodling in the margins. He did the same, and soon she had him playing Hangman. He was absolutely never going to guess _Ryan Gosling_ before his little guy died a grisly death.

Shulman walked in then with a package the size of a shoebox and a brown-paper bag. He pulled a banana from the bag and a condom from the box and demonstrated how to put a condom on. Mindy looked around – everyone was locked in a mortified silence – and then over at Danny, who had a deep vertical line between his eyebrows and a miserable look on his face. Wow, he did not come down well from a high at all, poor guy.

She turned back to Shulman who, still silently, took a Chinese eggplant from the bag and did the demo again. She was the first one to giggle, but once she'd started, the whole class joined in, everyone except Danny, who stared straight ahead and didn't say another word. She wondered what he was seeing, because his eyes weren't looking at anything she could see.

* * *

"The closest you've ever come to roughing it is just watching _Troop Beverly Hills_ and cringing through all of the camping scenes," Mags said.

"Exactly!" Mindy agreed. "Indians don't camp!" There, she'd just saved a billion people from having to pee outdoors.

"You don't know what you're missing," Maggie said, like they should all be jealous that her parents were dragging her through the woods to be a feasting-ground for all kinds of bugs and have to eat, like, roots and berries for a week.

The only thing that sounded worse than that was Gwen's agenda for their spring break, which was to go on a bunch of train rides to visit all of Carl's nearby universities – Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton – one more time so that he could make his final decision. At least she and Alex had the right idea; a staycation was the way to go. Sure, something with a little more excitement would be great, but it wasn't like she could afford to jet off somewhere.

"I can't believe it's already April," Gwen said, shaking her head. "This year has just flown by, don't you think?"

"Yeah, being immobile was a total blast," Maggie said, digging into her pudding-cup, rooting like a truffle-hunting pig. It was _really_ good pudding.

"But yearbook was fun, wasn't it?" Gwen asked anxiously. "And you two are going to be so great tomorrow at the assembly! Are you nervous?"

"Not even a little bit," Mindy said, lying through her teeth, because if Alex could do it, so could she.

*

The performance was like a dream – her skin got tingly and the lights seemed brighter – and Mindy could hardly comprehend that she was up there, singing and dancing and getting all the funny lines. She found Gwen and Maggie, two blonde heads together, in the audience right away, and directed most of her performance to them rather than to imaginary Channing Tatum. Still, she'd caught a glimpse of Danny's face, just once, the first time she used his Staten accent for Adelaide; he'd looked like he wanted to laugh but wasn't sure if that was allowed. Doofus.

Gwen looked sympathetically at her when she sang, _If she's getting a kind of name for herself, and the name ain't his_ , but the situation in the play had nothing to do with two-timing douchebags, so she didn't let herself think about Josh when she was supposed to be emoting for her one and only Nathan Detroit. Jeremy, she was pleased to see, looked right at Maggie a couple of times, prompting a big dumb smile from her, which, no – never give a dude that much power.

She belted out _Take back your mink, take back your pearls – what made you think that I was one of those girls?_ with real feeling, remembering how good it had felt to throw away Josh's key pendant. She was her own woman, her own warrior, just like Miss Adelaide. She could see Shulman, that big hippie sap, pressing tissues to his eyes and mouthing along with all of the lyrics. Behind him was Duncan Deslaurier, Brendan's creepo brother, who was filming the whole show.

It all ended before she knew it, and then all she could hear was applause. Thank god spring break was starting as soon as the bell rang, because she could sleep for a _week_ once she crashed from this adrenaline high.

*

Dad printed out the review of the assembly performance from the online school newspaper and stuck it up on the fridge, even though the paper barely had any journalistic standards at all and the reviewer had misspelled her name. Mom wrestled Rishi into his high chair, scattered some Cheerios onto the tray, and sat down with an air of relief. 

"I'm sorry we couldn't come to the assembly," Mom said, taking one Cheerio to trick Rishi into trying to eat them all himself; he was still a little underweight, a little smaller than other kids his age. "Do you think you'll get to perform again?" she asked, mashing up a banana.

"I doubt it. Sheila Hamilton's totally milking the whole thing," Mindy said with a shrug. Doing the dance with the feather boas in front of the whole school was one thing, but doing it in front of her parents was something else entirely. She stole a Cheerio for herself, and Rishi's face went _hilarious_ , all indignant and dramatic.

"Don't spoil your dinner," Mom said, and put the little bowl of mashed banana in front of Rishi.

Dad started feeding Rishi the banana, making silly faces at him. "I don't want to miss out. Just do your favorite song for us?"

"Rishi responds well to music," Mom chimed in, and started clearing a space in the kitchen. Mindy looked at her little brother's wide eyes, fixed on her from the moment she began singing, and turned her songs into an insanely long medley. She hadn't even noticed Dad recording the whole thing on his phone, but she was _totally_ claiming responsibility for the new dimple that popped up in Rishi's chubby cheek.

*

The rest of the break flew by, of course. She'd barely had time to marathon the first two seasons of _Grey's Anatomy_ – before all the relationships went off the rails – when suddenly it was Friday night, and she could count the hours before she had to drag herself back to East Park. She moaned a little into her pillow, Brown Bear warm and comforting under her cheek.

She woke up the next morning in Mom's arms, Dad standing next to the bed, holding Rishi and smiling down at them. "What?" she asked, rubbing her eyes.

"It's your star birthday, thangam," Mom said, kissing her cheek fiercely.

"My baby girl," Dad said, dropping a kiss into her hair. "It's hard to believe you were once this small," he said, hefting Rishi back into the crook of his arm.

"I don't think I was," Mindy said, because, hello, she'd seen the pictures and she'd been round like a beach ball and Rishi was still like little baby Gumby.

"You were beautiful. People used to stop me and ask how I got you to smile all the time," Mom said, curling up against her like they were going to hang out in her bed all day trading Mindy stories. "Such a happy baby."

"I totally ruled, right?" she asked, and Dad started laughing, which set Rishi off, and his little chirpy giggles were the cutest thing ever.

* * *

"Urrrgh, why are we even back?" Mindy groaned. "It's not like they're gonna teach us anything in the two weeks before finals. Also, why do we have a final in _Gym_? That's just crazy, right? I'm not wrong about this."

"The real question is, why do we even have to take finals?" Alex said. "When am I ever going to use geometry in real life?"

"Playing pool, maybe?" Maggie said.

"Mags, that was totally rhetorical," Mindy pointed out. She turned to Gwen, who had been suspiciously quiet. "Hey, you okay?"

"Yes," Gwen said, smiling. "Guys, just get through finals and then we've got the summer. My parents said we could use the house in the Hamptons whenever we want."

Mindy squealed, because things had suddenly taken a turn for the _awesome_.

*

Going shopping with Mom was nothing like boutique-hopping with the girls. Mom aimed for K-Mart and Target, for the practical stuff like underwear and socks and jeans and tops; she had a list and she was on a mission, and there was no way any of this excursion would make a decent shopping montage in a movie.

"What's going on?" Mindy asked. "Wouldn't this be easier with Rishi actually here?" Mom had a crazed look in her eyes as she flipped through racks of baby clothes like a speed-reader. Actually, that would be kind of an amazing superpower, to judge clothes at the speed of light.

"No," Mom said distractedly, turning and pulling out a stack of little collared shirts that Rishi would be swimming in.

"Those are way too big –" she started to say, but Mom interrupted.

"They're for your cousins."

"And you're shipping them over?" she asked, fingers crossed that for once she could actually spend the summer with her friends instead of sweating the days away in Mumbai, waiting for her cousins to get home from school so that they could have super-serious talks about their ambitions and dreams. 

"We're going the day after you finish school. Everyone is so excited to see you," Mom said, trying to make it sound like an adventure, but this wasn't her first rodeo. Ugh, why her parents insisted on this annual pilgrimage when they'd already escaped India was completely beyond her. Too bad she couldn't let them go and have fun with all their siblings while she stayed and partied in New York.

Next summer, definitely.

*

Finals seemed like they were dragging on _forever_ , with all of her classes set up as either review sessions or exam time. There was no way she was going to do well in French, so she triaged and decided to cut it out of her study time entirely. Maybe she should just watch the Meg Ryan oeuvre with the French subtitles on and see what stuck.

Mindy focused her energy on bio and geometry, where she knew the stuff anyway and could maybe even ace the exams. Midterms had confirmed that Danny was the only one she needed to worry about academically, and she wondered how he was studying and if he'd been roped into tutoring the other baby jocks on his team. She was sure he wouldn't have anything as fabulous as her handmade glittery flashcards to rely on.

"I just don't get _any_ of this," Gwen said, pushing away her bio textbook, and Alex looked up with doleful eyes, silently admitting the same.

"It's just photosynthesis," Mindy said, flipping through her notes to make sure she had every possible topic covered on the exam down pat.

"Explain the Calvin Cycle, then," Gwen asked, and Mindy got out the green flashcards one more time.

*

The only final she had left was Health – the Gym final had ended up being a game of dodgeball, like she needed to worry about a ball thwacking her and knocking all of the geometry formulas she'd memorized out of her head – and she dragged her feet on the way.

She sat next to Danny, who leaned over and said, "There's nothing on the board," in a hopeful tone.

"Yeah, and Shulman's not carrying anything except some index cards," she answered. Maybe this final wouldn't be so bad?

"Class," Shulman said, walking down the aisles and handing out index cards, which were unsettlingly blank, and suddenly Mindy couldn't remember what the diagrams for male and female sex organs had looked like _at all_ , so she was going to fail _Health_ , of all things, and that would be _mortifying_. "There's only one question on this exam." She began to breathe a little easier. "What is the one thing you've accomplished this year that you're happiest about?"

Duh, how had she forgotten what a hippie Shulman was? Of course he wanted to do some self-affirming garbage. She looked over at Danny with a little smirk, only to see his intent face as he wrote something down on his card and turned it over. Surprised, she looked around and _everyone_ was actually doing the assignment, so she sat back and thought about it.

What should she put down? She'd gotten – and dumped – a boyfriend of unimpeachable hotness. She'd figured out how to be an amazing big sister. She'd continued to rock as a friend. She'd played with a really cute puppy. She'd been in the zone as Miss Adelaide. She'd lost two pounds without even exercising. This was starting to sound like the list at the beginning of _Bridget Jones' Diary_ , she thought, tapping her pen against the card. She really needed to read that again.

"All set?" Shulman asked, lumbering down the aisles to collect the cards, and Mindy scribbled, _Being a matchmaker for two awesome people,_ because she'd worked hard on that, and the universe had done her a solid when it turned out Jeremy was going to the same summer soccer camp that Maggie had been going to for years; it was nice to be appreciated on, like, a cosmic scale.

"Just think about how good you're feeling right now, and hold on to that while you go on whatever adventures you're undertaking this summer," Shulman said, sitting at the big desk and smiling benevolently at all of them, and Mindy couldn't help smiling back.

"Now let's see what you've been up to." He shuffled the stack of cards and read the one on top. "'I made Sunday dinner for my whole family.'" There was an awkward silence until he said, "Congratulations. That's a good one," and then they all kind of applauded. Mindy wanted to look around and figure out who'd written that one, but Shulman was already on the next one. "'I can finally do a' – oh, I'm going to butcher this, sorry – 'a fouetté rond de jambe en tournant.'" That had to be Shalita Foxx, who'd been doing ballet forever. "'I taught my little brother how to read,'" Shulman read next, and Mindy looked over at Danny, who was fidgeting like he had ants in his pants. She should have guessed he wouldn't put something like _I got the highest grade on the bio midterm_ or _I took a hit to the face like a total badass_. It was kind of cute that being a big brother made him happier than any of the other stuff.

They got through all the dumbasses' shining moments, and they were so interchangeable that she didn't even bother guessing whether it had been Stevie or Tom or some other loser who'd written each one. She was surprised that no one guessed hers, other than Danny, who gave her what he probably thought was a sardonic glance, but he just looked constipated. She rolled her eyes at him, startling him into a laugh.

"Hey," he said after the bell had deafened them all once more, "we're doing a pick-up game in the park after school. You could come."

Okay, so she had learned to appreciate baseball just the slightest little bit, but there was no need to go overboard. "I can't. We're shopping for Gwen's prom dress after school." Danny's face was totally blank. "Because she's going to prom? Hello? Because her boyfriend finally officially asked her to the most romantic event of her life? Hey, Danny, is any of this sinking in?"

"Gwen has a boyfriend?" he asked, then grinned when she smacked his arm. "I'm kidding! I know, it's that senior, right? Charles?"

Ugh, he was hopeless.

*

"I can barely see your bra strap, honestly," Alex said, trying to calm Gwen down.

"I think I can pin it like a sari," Mindy said, "if you want to be sure." It was a good thing that Gwen's lavender dress had all that silver beadwork on the bodice, because the shine of a stainless-steel pin would just blend in.

"Yes, please," Gwen said, clutching her hands. "My firstborn kid is yours, okay?"

As if she wanted to be saddled with another baby.

"Speaking of which," Alex said, pulling a couple of brightly wrapped condoms out of her pocket, "I got these for you."

"Alex!" Gwen said, looking totally shocked.

"Come _on_ , Carl's probably got a reservation at some swanky hotel."

"No, he doesn't. We already talked about it, and anyway I have to be home by midnight." Gwen sounded far calmer about this than she had about the possibility of having to go braless to Prom.

"Really?" Alex sounded disappointed. "When are you guys gonna do it, then?"

"We'll figure it out," Gwen said. "Mindy, pin me?"

"Yeah," Mindy said, snapping into action. "Alex, have you –?"

"Over Christmas," Alex said, sitting next to Maggie on Gwen's bed. "With my mom's neighbor, who was _smoking_ hot."

"How many times?" Maggie asked.

"Three different days, lots of times."

"And how was it?" Mindy asked, which was as close as she could get to asking _But how did you know what to do? Weren't you scared?_

"Even better than he said it'd be," Alex said, grinning. "I highly recommend it."

Mindy turned her attention back to Gwen's dress. The pin had definitely helped. "All done."

"You look beautiful," Alex said, and Mags nodded.

"We never decided what we were gonna do with your hair, did we?" Mindy asked, taking it down from its ponytail, watching it fall in perfect golden curls. She met Gwen's eyes in the mirror and smiled, pushing all other thoughts out of her head so she could get her BFF ready for the biggest night of her life.

*

Yearbooks came out on the last day of school, and it looked like Maggie's evil plot had gone unchecked, because they – and Jeremy – were all over that thing. Mindy tucked her summer reading list inside it for safekeeping and got down to cleaning out her locker. There was the ten-dollar pashmina she thought she'd lost, and there was Chloe-the-egg's diary. She tucked those away in her bag, chucked all the rest of her old tests and assignments in the big trash can set in the middle of the hallway, and closed the emptied locker with an emphatic, cathartic slam. 

Final grades were only coming out after she flew to Mumbai, _of course_ , but she could check her school email from there and see where she stood in terms of class rankings. She'd be online anyway, emailing Alex in France and Gwen in the Hamptons and Maggie up at Columbia – anything that would keep her sane in the face of her unbearably lame cousins' earnest conversations.

Gwen treated them to Big Gay Ice Cream after school but it was too packed to linger, so they wandered without a destination in mind. Mindy's coffee shake was a distant memory by the time Alex and Mags peeled off, and Gwen turned a few blocks later to head home, still working on her Bea Arthur cone.

This was her last chance for really good New York pizza for a couple of months, since they were flying out first thing in the morning. No, wait, what she would definitely not be able to get, surrounded by her no-nonsense hardcore-vegetarian extended family, was a real hot dog. She got two, slathered with mustard and sauerkraut, from the next cart she saw and kept walking.

"Hey, Mindy," she heard as she was finishing the last bite, and looked up to see Danny, holding hands with his little brother, who was barely holding on to a baseball with his other hand and wearing a paper crown on his head.

"Hey," she said as soon as she'd swallowed. "Hey, Richie."

"He's shy," Danny said when Richie pressed his face into the back of Danny's legs rather than answer her. 

"Oh. Too bad," she said, "because I really needed someone to read my shirt for me."

There. One big eye peeked around Danny's jeans and looked hard at her shirt. She looked up and saw Danny staring at her chest. "Hey! That invitation was for Richie, you perv." She pushed his chin up with a finger and felt it move when he smiled.

"What do you think, Richie?" Danny asked, pivoting a little to look at his brother, his head cocked to one side. "You think you can read Mindy's shirt?" He squatted to get out of the way, making himself shorter than Richie. Mindy stood still, her hands on her hips, watching Richie's little mouth move as he tried to sound out the four words printed on her shirt next to drawings of sushi rolls.

Richie frowned in concentration, then lunged at Danny to whisper in his ear. Mindy smiled, because the kid clearly had no idea how to actually control the volume of his voice, and she could hear each word loud and clear.

"Very good!" Danny praised, and the kid lit up. "You're right, it says, 'That's how I roll.' High five, Richie." Ugh, it was all _painfully_ cute, watching Richie drop the baseball in his eagerness to smack hands with his big brother. 

"High five for me, too?" she asked, and Richie didn't even hesitate before slapping her hand. "Ow," she said, shaking it out, "you're way too strong for me, buddy." Richie giggled and Danny stood up, mouthing _Thanks_ at her. She nodded and tightened her ponytail. "What're you guys up to this summer?" she asked.

"Baseball!" Richie announced proudly, scampering off to retrieve the ball he'd dropped.

"Yeah, and I got a job at the deli," Danny said. She was all ready to commiserate over having to spend the summer doing something totally unfun, but he didn't look all that put out. Of course – had she forgotten that he was a little old man at heart? He was probably thrilled to be building up his 401(k).

"Well, I should get home, rest up before our flight," she said.

"Yeah," Danny said, like he'd heard she'd be away; she knew it, he was a total stalker. "Have a safe flight," he said, like he was her travel agent.

"Okay, I will. See you around."

"See ya," Danny said, just as Richie piped up to say, "Bye."

*

Flying was the _worst_. But she had Brown Bear in her hand luggage and a full iPod and her paperback copy of _Bridget Jones' Diary_ to get her through it. She just had to survive the summer without her friends, she thought, and put a hash mark on the inside cover of her book. One day down, only sixty more to go.


	3. Sophomore Year: Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “This is our year, Gwen. This is, like, the first season in the television show of our life. We have to be ready.”

“This is it,” Mindy said, shifting the phone to her other ear as she threw a sequined off-the-shoulder top onto her bed, next to Brown Bear. “This is our year, Gwen. This is, like, the first season in the television show of our life. We have to be ready.” She added a hot pink skirt trimmed with velvety ribbons and fished out a pair of cute flats from her closet, and nodded to herself as she surveyed the result. Nailed it.

Gwen’s voice was wry in her ear. “You do know we’re going to be sophomores now, right, Mindy?”

Maybe she should go with her green and pink plaid blouse instead of the sequins? Ugh, this was what jetlag did to her - it rendered her unable to rely on her own sterling fashion sense. “Exactly. Nobody makes shows about freshmen in high school, Gwen. Sophomore year is the sweet spot. You get to have three seasons of running time before you have to worry about graduation and your cast turning into twenty-somethings who are all, like, majorly old.”

“And that’s us.”

Mindy nodded, then remembered Gwen couldn’t see her. “I realized something important this summer while being forced to sweat away my life: if I want to be like that twenty year old actress who’s only playing a high schooler, I need to start living my life like I already _am_. We are going to have the best year ever, Gwen. We are going to meet cute boys this year, fall in love, get unexpectedly asked to the senior prom, and probably end up being prom queen.”

“You know I can’t meet a cute boy this year, Mindy. I’m dating Carl.”

“Oh my god, you act like you’re _married_ to him. Fine, so you’re, like, the best friend character who’s already settled down with her weird, off-screen college boyfriend. Hey, do you think I should wear that shirt with the sequins for the first day of school, or that green and pink plaid button-down I got at H &M last year?”

“Which sequined shirt?”

Mindy squinted at the shirt. It winked at her temptingly, like a disco ball. “The cute one? From that thrift store.”

“Plaid,” Gwen said promptly, and Mindy made the swap on her bedspread. Definitely the right choice. She had the wardrobe, now all she needed to do was unleash her star power on an unsuspecting world.

* * *

“ _Mindy_!” Maggie screamed from across the sidewalk, and launched herself at Mindy, wrapping her legs around Mindy’s waist, where she was waiting outside the school for Gwen to show up. Mindy stumbled backward.

“Oh my god, Mags, get _off_ , you weirdo.” Maggie unwrapped her man-crusher thighs from around Mindy’s hips and jumped back a step, bouncing on the balls of her feet. Jeremy was standing behind Maggie and next to Alex, openly laughing at the two of them, the jerk.

“Hey, Mindy,” Alex said with a smile, and went in for a normal hug, like a normal person who didn’t assault her normal friends like a crazy person.

“Bonjour,” Mindy said.

Alex grinned. “Mon français est si bien maintenant!” Mindy was so going to pick Alex’s brain for help with her French this year after Alex’s summer abroad.

Maggie crossed her arms over her chest. “I will punch the next person who says something in a language other than English.” Jeremy wrapped an arm around Maggie’s shoulders like a proud dad in his librarian cardigan and t-shirt, and even though Mindy knew the two of them had hooked up over the summer at soccer camp, it was still strange to see it in action for the first time. They both looked tan and golden and intimidating, like sleekly muscled Olympic soccer gods.

“‘Scuse me,” a girl’s voice said, and Mindy looked up to see a black girl with amazing legs rocking a sweet side ponytail and a mini-skirt. “Do any of you know where the office is?”

“Main doors on the right,” Mindy said.

“You a freshman?” Mags asked, looking the new girl over with interest, probably on the lookout for more people to initiate into her soccer-worshiping cult.

The girl snorted. “Hell no.”

Mindy waved. “I’m Mindy. And these losers are Maggie, Jeremy, and,” Mindy pointed, “Alex.”

“So are you a subsitute teacher or something?” Tamra asked, glancing at Mindy’s plaid jacket and down at her _Vogue_ -approved retro brown-fringed loafers.

Mindy’s mouth dropped open as Maggie began to snicker.

“Okay,” Tamra said, taking their silence for something like agreement, and walked away without saying another word.

“I’m a _student_!” Mindy yelled at her back, finally recovering herself. “My life is not _Never Been Kissed_!” Seriously, the life plan she’d hatched over the summer in Mumbai had been to channel Amanda Bynes in _She’s The Man_ , not Drew Barrymore looking like she was 30 or whatever.

“ _Well_ ,” Jeremy huffed. “I never.”

“Well I _never_ ,” Maggie repeated in a terrible British accent, and cracked up at her own joke.

“Hey, ladies!” Gwen said, finally showing her face. She gave all the girls a quick hug and even hugged Jeremy, which was awkward and hilarious at the same time. “Are we ready to do this thing?”

*

Mindy snagged a prime location in Lit, threw her purse down on the open desk in front of hers, and checked out the rest of the class. Betsy was chatting up the new girl Tamra in the back of the room, while Brendan Deslaurier had his stuck-up, snotty nose in an actual hardcover book on the other side of the classroom, trying to show the rest of them up. Danny threw his bag under the desk behind her, then leaned forward to tap her on the shoulder.

“Hey. How was your summer?”

“Trust me, you don’t want to know.” Danny sat back again, looking kind of hurt, and crap, she hadn’t meant to hurt the guy’s feelings. “I mean, _I_ don’t even want to know. Mumbai was smelly and boring and located only like eight inches away from the sun. Same old, same old.”

He shrugged, but seemed a little less weird about it. “I don’t know. I’ve never gone anywhere. It seems cool to me.”

“You’ve never left New York?”

“I mean, I've been to Cape May.”

“Seriously? Cape May, New Jersey?” OMG, Danny probably didn’t have a passport. Even _Rishi_ had a passport, and he couldn’t even speak.

“Yeah. All over Jersey.”

“Why?”

Danny looked affronted, like he couldn’t believe he actually had to defend the honor of New freaking Jersey. “The shore, cookouts, you know?”

“Oh. I thought you'd be all 'Bruce Springsteen reasons.'”

“I... don’t think that’s a thing.” Danny’s eyes flitted away when he said it. Dude was such a liar.

“Hey, Mindy. Danny,” Alex said, and threw Mindy’s purse back at her. “Thanks for saving me a seat, you guys.”

“No problem, Alex,” Danny said, totally bogarting her credit. Mindy narrowed her eyes but kept her mouth shut. She could let it slide. For now.

* * *

“Welcome to Latin club!” a girl with a thin face and Disney princess eyes behind coke-bottle glasses chirped as Mindy walked in the classroom.

Latin club consisted of a small group of people Mindy didn’t recognize sitting at desks arranged in a semicircle. One of them was slouching halfway down his chair in a t-shirt with _si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes_ printed on the front, which was almost certainly some dumb joke in Latin that only pretentious people understood. Great.

“Olé,” Mindy said weakly. She was starting to think she’d been a sucker to settle for the promise of future academic success and not hold out for actual bribery from her parents for checking this thing out.

“You know we’re not that kind of Latin club, right?” The guy who’d just spoken was actually pretty cute, with a lanky build and a weirdly attractive little twist of a smirk around his lips instead of a smile. “We’re the whole dead people, dead language deal.”

Maybe Latin club wouldn’t be such a wash after all.

“I don’t know, sounds hot to me,” Mindy said, and stuck her hand on her hip, going for a sexy (yet totally educated) flirting-about-dead-languages pose/tone, and probably nailing it.

The guy just laughed, smiling at her. “I’m Jamie.”

“Mindy,” she said.

“And I’m Lucy,” the girl with the glasses said, pushing them up her nose with an ungraceful jab.

Mindy looked around the semicircle of grim nobody’s-having-fun-here faces. “So is the first rule of Latin club that we’re not supposed to talk about Latin club?”

Nobody said anything, which, when you thought about it, was a pretty persuasive answer to her question right there.

* * *

“I can’t believe Richard Gere used to be hot,” Mindy said, staring at the credits with something like awe. “I mean, way old, yeah, but still hot.”

“I liked how Julia Roberts was really into flossing her teeth,” Gwen said, picking a yellow Starburst out of the bowl in the middle of the floor and unwrapping it with the determined resignation of a finalist at a hot dog eating contest about to take the title.

“You would be,” Alex said.

“‘I’m a safety girl!’” Maggie mimicked in a peppy voice, and Alex laughed and threw a pillow in her direction. Mindy wiggled her toes in her sleeping bag. She could see the clock on the microwave through the kitchen, glowing a backlit 1:12 AM in the darkness. 

“I’m just saying,” Gwen continued, “if I was a hooker, I’d carry floss and a toothbrush around with me all the time. And a cellphone. Did it freak anybody else out that Julia Roberts didn’t have a phone on her?”

“She wouldn’t have had room in her bra for a cellphone from back then. Weren’t they the size of cars or something?”

“Pretty sure,” Mindy confirmed.

“I’m so going to get Jeremy to do that thing with the piano with me,” Maggie said with a gross look of anticipation, and Alex started half-choking/half-coughing. “What? It was totally sexy.”

“Where are you even going to find a piano?”

“Band room,” Maggie said confidently.

Gwen wrinkled her nose cutely. Everything she did was cute. Seriously, Mindy didn’t understand how she pulled it off. “Eew. Remind me to never touch that piano again.”

“Oh, please, like you wouldn’t get it on with Carl on top of some piano in a heartbeat.”

“Not a _public_ one,” Gwen said primly.

Maggie threw a jellybean, which bounced off Gwen’s forehead and disappeared into the folds of her sleeping bag. “Po-ta-to, po-tah-to.”

“So what are we watching next?” Alex asked.

“ _Step Up_?” Mindy asked, sifting through their options. “I haven’t seen that one in forever.”

“Mmm, Channing Tatum,” Alex said, dreamily.

“I’ll see your Channing Tatum and raise you _naked_ Channing Tatum,” Gwen said, pulling a copy of Magic Mike out from her bag like a magician unveiling the rabbit from a hat, and Maggie hooted her approval.

Mindy glanced cautiously back at the dark hallway behind them. “Okay, but you have to be quiet,” Mindy warned, slipping the DVD out of its case. “If Rishi wakes up and Channing Tatum is getting hot and heavy all over my parents’ TV, it won’t end well.”

* * *

Mindy’s phone buzzed in her hand. She hit the power button without looking down. Mr. Yuen was droning away at the chalkboard about the Quakers, religious persecution, blah blah blah. Mindy risked a look down at the screen as soon as his back was turned to point to a map of Pennsylvania; it was a text message from Gwen, who was supposed to be sitting in front of her and hadn’t shown up for US History, even though she’d definitely been in French class with Mindy that morning.

_football field now 911 ___

Mindy shoved the phone back in her bag, then raised her hand and gave a vague explanation that she hoped sounded like she was sailing the red sea without, you know, actually coming out and _saying_ that. Brendan gave her a disdainful look from the front of the classroom as she walked out. Ugh, he was such a weirdo, with his creepily intense little eyes and sycophant brother.

It was raining outside, a sad, cold, bitter-about-life drizzle, and for the first time Mindy started to feel worried. What if Gwen had slipped on something because of the rain and she’d only been able to text Mindy because Mindy was programmed as the first number on her phone? What if this was, like, a legit medical emergency? And Mindy was going to have to do CPR to save Gwen, which she totally knew how to do, because her mom had made her take all those first aid classes at the hospital when Rishi had been born, so she was about to rock this situation and end up with her picture in the paper for bravely cutting class and saving her best friend, definitely.

Mindy started to run.

She rounded the corner of the building, heart thumping with the exercise and fear, dirt from the sidewalk streaked up the side of her yellow knee-high socks. Her bangs were plastered flat to her forehead. She stopped at the fence to catch her breath, trying to blink the rain out of her eyes.

She spotted Gwen sitting on the far bleachers, head bent, blonde hair falling forward to hide her face like a dark, wet curtain.

Mindy jogged over to her and collapsed next to Gwen on the cold metal bleachers, little pools of water caught in the grating, soaking Mindy’s pea-green wool skirt. The field was muddy and empty, a lonely expanse of churned-over dead grass and chain link fences, a world apart from the loud, bright place it had been during the spring, when the school turned it into a baseball diamond for spring sports.

“Oh my god, Gwen, I thought you were _dying_ ,” Mindy gasped, trying to catch her breath.

Gwen looked up at her for the first time, eyes lined with red.

“My mom came to take me out to lunch today and she told me - Mindy, she told me we’re moving. To Washington, DC.”

“What?” Mindy asked dumbly.

“We’re moving,” Gwen repeated, starting to cry. “To DC. My dad got transferred.”

Mindy reached out for Gwen’s hand, and that was when Mindy realized that the whole sitting-outside-weeping-in-the-rain deal, that was something that happened in real life. And it didn’t make Mindy’s life feel awesome, or like a movie or a TV show. It was mostly just really, really shitty.

*

Mindy poked disconsolately at her saag paneer that night. Rishi was screaming in his booster seat, waving his fists like pom-poms and deflecting any attempt to get food near his mouth. Mom was singing little songs to Rishi to distract him long enough to sneak spoonfuls of food through his defenses.

Dad leaned a little closer to her, speaking under the wail of Rishi giving voice to every single bit of injustice in the entire world. “You’re awfully quiet tonight, kondai. Everything okay?”

Mindy started to nod, and then changed direction, shaking her head. She could feel tears starting to build in her eyes.

“Gwen’s moving,” she managed to choke out, and Mom looked up, mid-airplane flight with Rishi’s plastic spoon, surprise and concern in her face.

“Oh, no, the Rileys are moving?”

Mindy didn’t trust the way her throat felt tight and swollen, so she nodded instead. Her dad put a hand on her shoulder, and her mom put down Rishi’s spoon and reached for Mindy’s hand across the table. Even Rishi forgot to continue yelling without the constant threat of food he didn’t want to eat being shoved at his face, and bubbled down to a low gurgle, staring at the three of them with dark, curious eyes.

* * *

“We have to promise to text and call each other all the time,” Mindy said, and Gwen nodded as they shuffled forward another place in line. “And watch movies together. And I looked it up, and DC isn’t so far away, so we could totally take the bus to see each other on weekends. Chocolate cinnamon and peanut butter nutter, please.”

“Vanilla bean and strawberry swirl,” Gwen said.

The college guy dishing up their gelato had a streak of blue in his perfectly coiffed hair and a necklace with a silver-y spiral pendant over a tight grey t-shirt. He tipped his head back and winked at Gwen as he handed her the fluorescent plastic cup with the serving spoon sticking out of the top. She blushed like a tomato and fumbled handling him the change.

“You hussy!” Mindy whispered as soon as they were safely out of range. “What would Carl think about you flirting with the gelato boy?”

Gwen laughed, her color high. “Shut up, Mindy.”

“Wait, I have to text my best friend about this.” Mindy pulled out her phone and spoke out loud as she typed. “ _O - M - G - Gwen - is - a - total - slut_. And… send.”

Gwen’s phone beeped, and she swiped the screen open. “ _BFFs forever, love, Mindy_ ,” she read.

Mindy dug out a large scoop of gelato. “Autocorrect is the worst.”

“Isn’t BFFs forever redundant? It’s like best friends forever… forever.”

“That just means it’s twice as true. Forever _forever_ , son.”

“Forever forever _forevah_ ,” Gwen repeated, starting to awkwardly rap.

“Oh my god, you should never do that.”

“What, I’m not gangster enough for you anymore?”

“Uh, basically. You do know,” Mindy said confidently, swirling her gelato flavors together in her cup to form a vortex of peanut butter-y chocolate goodness, “you’ll never have friends like us again.”

“Yeah,” Gwen said, the smile slipping from her face. “Yeah.”

*

Gwen’s moving day arrived faster than Mindy would have thought possible. Sure, she was busy helping Gwen pack, helping her go through all of her stuffed animals and clothes and the little collection of snow globes depicting various New York landmarks, but it was still a shock when the day - the actual day - arrived, and Mindy found herself standing in front of the moving van parked illegally on the street in front of Gwen’s apartment building, saying goodbye to her best friend for good.

“Don’t forget me,” Gwen said, hugging her again for the ten millionth time. “You won’t forget me, right?”

“You’re such a dummy,” Mindy said, and started to cry.

* * *

Mindy threw herself into her schoolwork with a vengeance to distract herself from the pale husk of a world that was life without her BFF. She ate lunch with Mags and Alex, but it wasn’t the same without Gwen there to lord her honorary group-mom status over the rest of them. Her classes were dull without Gwen to study with her; the only bright spot was Latin club, where Jamie managed to cheer her up without even realizing it, week after week.

“Hey.” Jamie nudged her foot with the side of his blue canvas Chucks. “Hey, Mindy.”

“Yeah?”

“ _Ad me choros_ ,” Jamie said, in a low voice.

“What?” Mindy asked. “Oh. Right. What does that mean?”

“I told you she wouldn’t get it, stupid,” Lucy said, and elbowed Jamie, giving Mindy a sympathetic grin. “Boys are the worst.”

“I’ll give you a hint,” Jamie soldiered on. “I spent a while last night trying to figure out how to say Homecoming in Latin.”

MIndy blinked. “Are you... asking me to the dance?” A low, warm feeling started to seep into her stomach, for the first time since Gwen left, because Jamie was hella cute and all Mindy could think about suddenly was how much she wanted to kiss him, to smudge his chapstick around and mess up his dark, curly hair.

He nodded.

“Yeah,” she said, starting to smile despite herself. “Yes. I’ll go.”

Jamie turned around to high-five Lucy and they both started to chat excitedly about how nervous they’d been that she’d say no. Mindy pulled out her phone and texted Gwen under the table, who responded a couple minutes later with a snapchat of herself giving the camera a cheesy thumbs-up while finger-drawn confetti rained down around her wide grin.

* * *

Mindy arrived at the Homecoming game early, so she scoped out a sweet spot on the bleachers for herself and Alex, put her thermos of hot cocoa at her side, wrapped herself in her mom’s blanket, and broke out her flashcards for some hardcore vocab prep. Parker was at it behind the bleachers in a sweatshirt with little streamers painted black stuck to it and a single hand-drawn yellow lightning bolt down the chest, trying to get people to high-five him. Seriously, she didn’t understand how that kid was making it through high school on a basic, fundamental, survival level.

Danny threw his bag down next to her and peered over her shoulder at her flashcards. He had to be stalking her - there were so many empty seats all around them, even if the bleachers had mostly filled up.

“Abscission,” he said, and sprawled back on the metal bench behind them, put his heels up on the seat in front of them, and tried to take up the maximum amount of space his tiny body could.

She flipped to the next flashcard.

“Fervid,” he said. She snapped her pink rubberband back around her flashcards.

“Are you trying to break my concentration, Danny?”

“Maybe I’m trying to stop you from being the loser who studies her flashcards at the Homecoming game.” A loud cheer went up around them, and Mindy looked down as the team ran onto the field, arms in the air like they’d already won something, sporting giant bobblehead helmets and killer shoulder pads like it was the 80s. Cheerleaders jumped up and down on the sideline, blonde curls bouncing and mini-skirts flaring.

“I think you’re just worried I’m going to crush you like a bug with my PSAT score.”

Danny snorted, but there was something kind of friendly about it. “What is Mindy Lahiri doing at a football game, anyway?”

“What, a girl with my impeccable sense of fashion can’t be into throwing the old hogskin around too?”

“Pigskin.”

“Whatever. I’m just here because I’m an awesome friend. Alex is covering the game for yearbook and I told her I’d be her moral support. She’s running a couple minutes late.” She reached over for her hot cocoa, twisted the lid off, and poured herself a half-cup. “Want some?” she asked, and held the lid out to Danny. He hesitated a second before taking it from her and raising it up to his lips to take a tiny, barely-there sip.

“I don’t have cooties, you know,” she said.

He defiantly took a second, bigger gulp before handing it back.

They sat quietly after that, Danny watching the field, cheering a couple times with the rest of the crowd like a buzzer system had gone off underneath every seat except for hers. She took a deep inhale of the steam from the cocoa and closed her eyes, listening to the sharp whistles and shouts from the field.

“Hey,” Danny said, and Mindy opened her eyes again, “I’ve been meaning to say, I’m sorry about Gwen. Moving really sucks.” Danny stretched himself out again, almost kicking the back of a guy two bleacher rows in front of them, “I know it sucks.”

Mindy tugged the blanket tighter around her shoulders. “Thanks.”

Danny nodded, color high on his cheekbones from the evening air.

“Do you ever miss Staten Island?” she asked.

“Sometimes. I used to miss it a lot.”

“Yeah?”

“My Ma made us move out here to the city after the sixth grade, right, so I had a chance to get into a better school. Anyway, I was pretty mad at her for a while after that. I’d take the ferry back on the weekends all the time, whenever I didn’t have to watch Richie. I couldn’t understand why she wanted to ruin my life.”

“So what changed?” She was weirdly fascinated - she was pretty sure she’d never heard Danny say so many words in a row before. It was like an exhibit at the zoo, if the zoo had talking lemurs in baseball jackets or something.

He wasn’t looking at her now; he was staring down at his hand, tracing the edge of the aluminum bleachers by his knee. “I met Christina,” he said finally.

And ugh, Mindy didn’t want to hear about how awesome Danny’s terrible ex-girlfriend was. She had a sneaking suspicion that Danny didn’t really want to talk about it, either. But he looked so down, and she’d always kind of wondered what had happened there, so she soldiered on. “How’d you meet Christina?”

He looked kind of shifty, glancing around them, before answering. “Look, you can’t tell any of the guys, but I was… I used to take dance lessons.”

“Danny! Shut up! That is so cool, dude.” She shoved him excitedly and he had to slap a hand down on the bleacher to keep from slipping sideways. “That’s why you’re so good at dancing!”

He looked startled. “What?”

“I was at this club one time and you were there.” It sounded super creeper as soon as the words came out of her mouth, so she rushed to cover it. “And you’re, like, a really good dancer, Danny. Crazy good. Like, Chris Brown good. But without the whole homophobia or violence against women thing.”

A crooked, almost shy, smile appeared on his face, and Mindy wondered why Danny didn’t smile like that all the time, ‘cause seriously, he’d be about ten million times more popular if he’d just drop the old man judginess every now and then.

“So you met Christina doing that?”

He nodded.

“And…?” she prompted.

“And…?” he repeated back at her. She rolled her eyes.

“So what happened with Christina?”

“We dated?”

“Oh my god, how are you so bad at sharing basic life information?”

He shot her a look she was pretty sure was only maybe a quarter-annoyed. Maybe half-annoyed. No more than three-quarters, definitely. “We broke up.”

“Was it because of the distance?” Mindy asked, wisely.

“No.”

“Was it like a _Footloose_ thing? You know, she’s a preacher’s daughter, you’re the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, and her dad doesn’t like the way you’re getting all down and dirty, so he forbids her from seeing you, but what nobody knows yet is that -”

“Also no.”

“Maybe a little bit?” she asked. “Maybe just the angry gymnastics in an empty warehouse part?”

“Seriously, no.”

“Well that sucks,” she said, and tucked her legs up underneath her blanket. It was getting legitimately cold out, the stars starting to gleam dimly over their heads through the haze of city lights. “But I guess I understand. I mean, where are you going to find a giant empty warehouse to do angry gymnastics in in New York, right? It’d probably have been converted into a giant expensive apartment building or something. Also, oh my god, is football always this boring?”

“I’m not even going to dignify that question with an answer,” Danny said, kind of snottily in her opinion.

“Mindy!” Alex was weaving her way up the bleachers, forcing people to stand up as she made her way past them like a game of whac-a-mole. Mindy waved back, and elbowed Danny in the side.

“Move over, Castellano,” she said, but it took a couple more gently encouraging jabs to the ribs before he finally inched over enough so that Alex could sit down between them.

* * *

Since they couldn’t do their normal pre-dance primping the next night at Gwen’s apartment anymore, and Alex had bailed on Homecoming because, according to her, she didn’t feel like third wheeling all night, Mags came over to her place to get ready. Mindy helped pin back Maggie’s blonde hair into a curly bun with ringlets framing her face, and then Maggie teased Mindy’s hair up into something that was sort of like a mini-beehive, only way hotter.

They texted a few choice selfies to Gwen and Alex, and then her parents had to come in and solidify their position as the Most Embarrassing Parents Ever by fussing over both of them the way they did when Rishi said anything that sounded vaguely like a real word; her dad was going _crazy_ with the camera. Sneaking off without all the drama last year had definitely been the right call.

“My little girl’s all grown up,” Mom beamed, and pinched her cheeks.

“Eew, _Mom_ , gross,” she said, and Maggie laughed until she fell off her chair.

*

Jamie looked long and lean in his suit, like if James Bond was gangly and about 80% more Jewish. She beamed up at him as he slipped a corsage of silver and purple on her wrist.

“You’re looking lovely tonight, Mindy,” Jeremy said, his arm looped around Maggie’s waist. Mindy preened.

“Thanks, Jere-bear.”

Jeremy winced. “Don’t call me that.”

“You want to dance?” Jamie asked, hot and low in her ear, and damn, she wanted to rub herself like a cat all over his fine, skinny body.

“Definitely.” She grabbed his hand to lead them onto the dance floor, but, to her surprise, Jamie started pulling her along instead, like a sharply-dressed tugboat, right into the middle of the dance floor where…

“ _Lucy_!” Jamie shouted, and Lucy turned to the two of them, hands in the air, decked out in an empire-waisted red number with a wire tiara perched up in her hair. She screamed happily and the two girls she was dancing with screamed as well, so Mindy threw her hands up and fake girl-screamed back at them, like they’d all just accidentally run into each other at the mall, oh my god! And then Jamie started getting down on the dance floor, right between the two of them, trying to angle himself so he was half-facing both Lucy and Mindy in an awkward three-way group dance situation.

 _So_ not cool.

* * *

“Danny,” Mindy said, and sidled up next to him in the lunch line, poking him with her pencil. “Hey Danny. Danny. Danny.” 

“ _What_.”

“I have to ask you something.”

“And you felt like you had to put a bunch of holes in my side first?”

“Mashed potatoes?” Morgan asked, gesturing at her with a ladle full of a lumpy white substance Mindy really hoped he was identifying correctly.

“I guess. Thanks, man.” Beverly slammed a half-sphere of potatoes down on Danny’s plate with a grunt. “Loving the hairnet, Beverly. Super stylish.” Mindy was determined to get on Beverly’s good side this year.

“It’s _thrifted_ ,” Beverly said, patting her hair. Mindy wrinkled her nose.

“What did you want, Mindy?” Danny asked.

“You’re not seeing anybody right now, right?”

Danny went still for a moment, hand outstretched to grab a can of root beer, before saying, a little warily, “Not really. Why?”

“Perfect. So you know Jamie, right?” she asked, handing her lunch card over to the cashier and graciously ignoring the total grumpface Danny had going on.

“Marching band Jaimie, or Lucy-and-Jamie Jamie?”

“It’s not Lucy-and-Jamie Jamie,” she snapped, and Danny raised an eyebrow as he set his tray down at an empty table. Mindy threw her own down dramatically next to him.

“Fine, yes, it’s Lucy-and-Jamie Jamie. And that’s the problem, Danny, because Jamie is, like, majorly cute. I want to him to be the Jay-Z to my Beyoncé, the Andrew Garfield to my Emma Stone, the Tom Hanks to my super adorbs 90s-era Meg Ryan.”

Danny popped the tab of his root beer, frowning. “So why are you…”

“…But we’ve been on three dates so far, and Lucy has showed up at all of them. _Including_ Homecoming, where I threesome-danced with her and Jamie for the _entire night_ , Danny. The entire night! Is that normal?”

He took a long, contemplative swig of his drink. “No?”

“No it is not! And I will not let her be the Joey to Jamie’s Dawson. Someday, someone is going to slap some lip gloss on her face, make her take off those dumb-looking glasses, and bam, I’ll lose Jamie before I even had him. Do you understand what I’m saying, Danny? I need you to Pacey Witter the crap out of this girl. What are you doing this Friday?”

“Nothing that I…”

“Perfect. Okay, so, game plan is, you’re going to put on that blue shirt you always wear for picture day that makes you look sort of hot, you’re going to borrow twenty bucks from your mom, and you are going to take Lucy out on the best freaking date of her life.” Mindy stabbed her fork into the towering lump of white mashed potatoes on her plate. “And I’ll be there too, so you don’t have to worry about messing it up.”

Danny blinked at her. “You’ll be what now?”

“Uh, _duh_ , Danny. It’s called double-dating for a reason.”

*

When she exited the West 4th Street subway stop, Danny was already there, waiting for her, wearing his sky-blue shirt and khakis that made him look he was going to church on a Sunday. And boom, she knew she’d been right to tell Danny to wear that shirt - it was kind of tight on him, ‘cause she was pretty sure he’d had it since middle school, and made him look like he might grow up to be one of those dark-eyed dudes with crazy long eyelashes on the front of a Harlequin novel someday. Just, like, a miniature version of that. Because he was short.

She smoothed down her skirt as they hoofed it over to the restaurant where they were meeting Jamie and Lucy ( _not_ Jamie-and-Lucy). Mindy was wearing the new outfit she’d gotten for Diwali after convincing her mom that she didn’t need a new sari when she only wore one once a year: a cute sailor-themed dress with a giant bow across her chest and navy blue Mary Janes with tiny white anchors as buckles. She caught Danny looking over at her out of the corner of his eye, and for any other guy she’d say that they were totally checking her out.

“Like it?” she asked, and spun around in a little circle after they crossed Washington Place to show off the entire package.

“It’s,” he said, and obviously stopped to search for the right word to describe her awesomeness, “…uh. Theatrical.”

Which was not where she thought he was going to go with that.

“Theatrical?”

“Yeah. Theatrical. Like you’re a character in a movie who’s really into boats.”

She frowned.

Danny cleared his throat and paused in front of the basketball court, where an intense game of three-on-three was happening. “So where are we going, anyway?” 

Mindy swept an arm in front of them and beamed, personal affront to her definitely awesome sense of fashion forgotten. It wasn’t like Danny knew what he was talking about anyway - the dude wore his JV jacket and jeans like they were going out of style. Pretty sad, really.

“John's Pizza. Come on.”

*

Dinner was a disaster.

 _Total_ disaster.

Danny hit it off with Lucy right away while they were standing in the line to get in, which was awesome and according to plan, but then Jamie started acting all weird and possessive about it, and then Danny was, like, _way_ too into what Lucy was putting down, which wasn’t much, if you asked Mindy. Seriously, she’d said to Pacey the girl, not psycho-stalk her. Mindy was starting to feel invisible. She picked the pepperoni off of her slice and looked down to reassure herself that she was still rocking her totally cute outfit.

After dinner, she shooed Jamie away from Lucy and Danny, who were chatting animatedly about some boring subject or the other. Then she put her arm through Jamie’s and forced him to meander up the street with her, and just like always, as soon as Lucy was out of his sight Jamie was a perfect gentleman, cute and charming and hanging on her every word.

Which is when they turned the corner and came across Lucy and Danny again, making out in the middle of the sidewalk. Danny was an inch shorter than Lucy, but he was leaning confidently into her, pushing her backwards against a lamp post, his hand spread wide against her side, perilously close to her ass.

She had to hand it to the guy, Danny looked like he knew what he was doing when it came to sucking face. Major snaps.

Next to her, Jamie’s jaw dropped.

Mindy put a hand on Jamie’s shoulder and steered him away from where Lucy and Danny were going at it like it was their job, mouths all over each other.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. “You know, it’s okay if you’re into Lucy,” she said to Jamie after a minute of him just standing there silently in shock, hating the words that were coming out of her mouth.

“I’m not…” Jamie started to say, then stopped, a weird, constipated look on his face. Ugh, Mindy was so not into _any_ of this.

“Seriously, dude? You and Lucy are basically living in a Taylor Swift song, if Lucy was blonde and wrote excellent songs about staring creepily out of her window at you. And I was, like, the hot cheerleader girl she slut shames.”

Jamie gaped at her, and Mindy rolled her eyes.

“Come on,” she said, and dragged Jamie up with her, pulling him back around the corner. “I’ll show you. Hey, Danny! Lucy!”

Lucy jumped back from Danny like their lips had electrified and darted a furtive glance at Jamie.

“Lucy, Jamie has something he wants to say to you,” Mindy said, and stepped aside to reveal the main attraction of the evening.

And that’s when Jamie took a deep breath, puffed out his chest, stepped out in front of Mindy, and boomed, loud enough for the whole street to hear, “Lucy, I’m in love with you.” A bunch of pigeons flew away at the noise and a homeless guy with dreadlocks looked up from where he was sleeping on a nearby bench. _Seriously_ embarrassing.

“What?” Danny asked, looking confused, his hair messed up and his mouth kind of swollen and red. 

Mindy walked over to stand next to Danny as Lucy and Jamie stared at each other like they’d never properly looked at each other before, realization dawning on their faces. Ugh, they looked like a tampon commercial or something.

“You... love me?” Lucy repeated.

Jamie, to his credit, totally nutted up and got it done. “Yeah,” he said, and took a step closer to Lucy, speaking more quietly. “I do. I think I always have.”

 _Barf_.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Danny said, not even bothering to keep his voice down.

“Double dating is the worst,” Mindy agreed, pulling Danny away from the romantic trainwreck in front of them. “Come on, Danny. Let’s go home.”

* * *

Maggie dragged Mindy out to her latest game, saying that it was better for Mindy to be outside in the fresh air rather than moping about Jamie and mainlining the entire series of _The Gilmore Girls_ for the fourth time, which, while _blatantly_ false (and Gwen had backed her play on that one), was also maybe not the worst idea in the world.

“Mags is a dynamo at the sport,” Jeremy informed her, like she needed the posh English equivalent of Morgan Freeman narrating the true-life drama of a bunch of girls running randomly around a field in pervy knee highs and pigtails. “We’re already planning to both try out for the city spring leagues.”

It was kind of crazy how attached Jeremy and Mags had become since the summer. Mindy and Alex had been forced to team up and threaten to jump Mags if she didn’t stop talking about how much she and Jeremy were getting it on, which was apparently _all the freaking time_. Meanwhile Mindy had only gotten to kiss Jamie a grand total of twice with all the Lucy gate-crashing that had been going down on their dates. Sometimes the world just wasn’t fair.

Mindy squinted at the scoreboard, which still registered a disappointing 0-0. Maybe the game hadn’t actually started yet? “Does anybody ever actually score goals in soccer?”

Jeremy settled back next to her on the bleachers with a satisfied air. “Not if it’s a good game.”

* * *

“You’re going to create a political party for the early 1800s,” Mr. Yuen announced, practically beaming, like the opportunity to do his homework assignment was the greatest gift he could possibly imagine bestowing on them. “You’ll pick a political issue of the time and a stance on it, name your party, write a campaign speech, and come up with a poster. We’ll have an election, everybody will vote, and there will be prizes for the winners. You’ll be working in pairs on this. Your partner will be assigned randomly.”

So, of course, she ended up paired with Brendan Deslaurier instead of somebody she actually wanted to be a partner with. Of _course_ she did. Alex shot her a sympathetic look across the classroom; she’d been paired up with Danny. Not fair at all.

“We should campaign to ditch Louisiana,” Mindy said to Brendan, trying to get their sad little brainstorming session going. “You know, Reverse the Purchase! Down with Jefferson!”

Brendan stared at her like she’d just grown a third arm. “You want our political party to be anti-the Louisiana Purchase. The _Louisiana Purchase_.”

“Uh, sure. Why not? It’ll make our poster way easy. We can just put a silhouette of Louisiana on it and then a big red X over top of it, or one of those circles and slashes like no smoking signs have. Boom, done.”

“You know the Louisiana Purchase wasn’t just Louisiana, right?”

“Whatever, Thomas Jefferson. We’re a political party. We’re working on simplicity here.”

He crossed his arms over his chest and looked at her with his dark, beady eyes. Ugh, she could practically _feel_ his gaze crawling over her skin. Was _Brendan Deslaurier_ checking her out? Mindy wasn’t sure whether to be grossed out or weirdly flattered.

Then Brendan said slowly, like he was explaining something to a five year old, “I think we should run on a political platform of peaceful and pure intentions for the United States.”

Nope, majorly grossed out. That was it.

“That is the lamest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“We could be against the War of 1812.”

“That... might work.”

“… _And_ we should divert the money that would have been used to fight the war into creating a sustainable future for the United States. Hemp futures are America’s future, Mindy. _Organic_ hemp futures. That’s a fact.”

“Oh my god, you are the _worst_ ,” Mindy said, and thunked her head down on her desk.

* * *

Yearbook, according to Alex, had been kind of a bummer this year, especially after the theme for the year had been decided ( _Reach For the Stars!_ had won, which was about as dumb as it got, really). Alex was doing the page layout for the track team photo and liberally cut-pasting crappy clip art stars with sunglasses all over the page with Mindy’s encouragement. Mindy could get used to being an honorary once-a-month contributor/art consultant for the school yearbook.

“Do you think anybody would care if I photoshopped Parker’s head into a star shape? I think it would really bring this year’s theme out.”

Alex looked up from finding the right spot for a particularly heinous star she’d found with a weird child molester-y leer going on. “Go for it,” she said. Then she sat up a little straighter in her seat. “Hey. So are you going to the Winter Formal with anybody yet?”

Mindy flopped backwards into the rolling chair, spinning it a couple feet backwards. “I don’t know. I’m thinking of going stag and being fabulously single. You know, like a _Sex & The City_ kind of thing?”

“Weren’t those girls usually dating somebody? Also, didn’t they have a lot of weird, rando sex?”

“I don’t know,” Mindy said glumly. “Like my parents would let me watch a show like that. Who are you going to the dance with?”

Alex turned away from her with a weirdly secretive air. “I’m… not sure yet.”

Mindy sat up straight for the first time, scenting blood in the water. “What does that mean?”

“It just means I haven’t decided yet.”

“Wait, does that mean somebody asked you? Does that mean more than one person asked you?”

“Not… exactly,” Alex hedged. “Maybe I’ll go stag with you. All the single ladies, right?”

“Riiiiiiiight.”

*

Text to: Gwen Riley  
From: Mindy Lahiri

_I think Alex got asked to the winter dance and isn’t telling me anything about it. What the hell, am I right?_

Text to: Mindy Lahiri  
From: Gwen Riley

_That bitch!!!!!_

* * *

Mindy’s parents finally got it squared away with Gwen’s parents for her to come visit in DC for the weekend, so Mindy caught the Bolt Bus after school on Friday and loaded herself up with homework for the trip - it was a good thing the bus had wifi, because she had a mountain of research on the War of 1812 to work her way through.

Gwen seemed taller to Mindy somehow, after just a couple months of living apart. Skinnier, maybe. Gwen’s long, blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail at the base of her neck, and she was wearing a sporty dress that Mindy had never seen before. She looked… different. Like she was just some girl with blonde hair that Mindy would walk right by without a second glance.

But then Gwen jumped up and down, clapping her hands, and pulled Mindy into a hard hug, and the strange feeling passed. Of course Gwen wasn’t a stranger. Gwen was her best friend.

Gwen took her to see the private high school she attended now (“I’m, like, the poorest person there, Mindy. It’s awful.”) and Mindy made them go see the Washington Monument so they could talk about all the movies that had taken place in its vicinity. They topped their day of sightseeing off with pedicures and a viewing of _The American President_ , because, as Maggie had once informed them, it was every American woman’s patriotic duty to think about having sex with the President at least once in her life (which they’d all agreed was a disgusting prospect, unless you were _maybe_ talking about Obama, until Mags had clarified that you were supposed to bang Presidents in their younger, hotter pre-law days).

“Okay, so I think Alex is going to the dance with… Mr. Shulman,” Gwen said, swiping a second coat of hot pink on Mindy’s toenails as the credits for the movie scrolled by.

“ _Gwen_! You perv.”

“What, like he’s not an old school hottie?” Gwen asked, trying and failing to stifle a giggle. “You could rub his head like a bald magic 8 ball.”

Mindy ignored that, because seriously, _major_ eew. “What about Stevie?”

Gwen shook her head. “I don’t even think they know each other. Speaking of which, did you ever find anybody to go to the dance with?”

Mindy flexed her toes against the squishy plastic dividers between them. “No.”

Gwen slapped her ankle. “Stop moving your toes, dummy. And you should just ask somebody. You know, pick a guy you don’t really _like_ like but you wouldn’t mind making out with, and then it doesn’t matter if they say no. Go all Sadie Hawkins on their ass.”

“I don’t know,” Mindy said as Gwen finished with her last pinkie toe. “I like it when the guy asks me out.”

“We all do. That’s why I’m saying you should pick somebody you don’t really care too much about.”

Mindy shook the bottle of the color that Gwen had picked, rattling the little metal ball inside. “Maybe,” Mindy said finally.

* * *

It was a week before the Winter Formal and Mindy still didn’t have a date. Alex was acting all weird and shifty about the dance, Gwen was going to her own school dance half a world away with stupid Carl who didn’t seem to care that his girlfriend had uprooted and relocated her entire life, and Maggie and Jeremy had been fighting constantly since soccer playoffs had started, alternating screaming matches with intense and way too public makeout sessions. It was enough to make Mindy think she might skip the whole deal if she had to go stag.

She met up with Brendan after school on Monday so they could rehearse their campaign speech, distill it into a catchy slogan (“Don’t be a bore, down with the war!”), and go over their platform for the whistlestop tour debate. They grabbed one of the small group-study rooms in the library and thundered their words at each other with theatrical gestures, because Brendan kept insisting that 90% of politics was in what you did with your hands.

“You know,” Brendan said when they were done, pushing himself back from the low study table, “this isn’t bad.”

“It isn’t, is it?” Mindy said, stretching her arms up over her head.

“Yeah. We make a good team,” he said, and, for the first time Mindy could remember, Brendan half-smiled at her, the corner of his mouth ticking upward. It was kind of weird and unnatural-looking, but also kind of... nice? He’d actually been pretty decent to work with once they’d agreed on a topic. Mindy suddenly realized that if she stopped thinking of Brendan’s dark eyes as _creepy_ she could maybe admit that there were other words to describe them. Words like _bottomless_. Or _like the night sky_.

Huh.

“Do-you-want-to-go-to-the-dance-with-me?” she blurted out, then slapped a hand over her mouth. What!

Brendan tilted his head in her direction, like a dinosaur that was deciding whether or not to stalk her through an abandoned building with freaky T-Rex baby arms. Stupid Gwen! Gwen was definitely the reason that Mindy couldn’t stop staring at Brendan’s bottom lip, the way it plumped outward in the middle, like something she wanted to bite and pull at like taffy.

“Okay,” Brendan said finally, after staring at her intensely for what felt like a solid fifteen minutes or so. “Sure. I’ll go with you.” He said it so weird, formally, like they were in 1800s England and he’d just, like, betrothed himself to her or something.

She cleared her throat, going for blasé. “Uh, okay. Cool.”

He pursed his lips together and nodded, and that was that.

*

Brendan even looked good in his suit when he met her in front of the gym, and for one brief, shining, glorious moment, Mindy was sure this was finally going to be the high school dance of her dreams: cute dress, strong hair game, a date she wanted to get all up in, kissing under the streamers as the music swelled around them. Paper snowflakes dangled from the ceiling, the light was low and blue-tinged, and shimmery silver icicles made of tinsel sparkled everywhere. Brendan was wearing a purple tie that kind of matched her reddish-purple cocktail dress, but, she realized with slow-dawning horror a moment later, when Duncan popped up from behind Brendan’s back, mostly coordinated with his brother’s matching tie and suit vest.

Because Duncan was there.

With them.

Beaming at Mindy like she was his date too.

“Why is your _brother_ here?” she hissed after Duncan went to go grab the three of them cups of punch.

Brendan looked faintly surprised, like she’d just asked why the sun was this hot yellow thing in the sky. “The more, the merrier. We give life energy to the universe and the universe repays us tenfold, Mindy. My brother is a valued part of my life, and we are sharing this moment with him.”

“Oh. My _god_. I’m just going to pretend like you didn’t say any of that.” Seriously, no part of her newly crafted persona was supposed to be into threesomes, but with Jamie-and-Lucy and now the Deslauriers, something along the way had apparently gone totally askew.

Duncan reappeared with the punch, and Mindy glumly resigned herself to yet another high school dance of group dancing and awkward third wheeling.

Mindy was in the middle of plotting how to get Duncan to leave them alone for, like, five seconds, so she could try to test out her theories regarding Brendan’s majorly kissable bottom lip when she spotted Alex on the other side of the gym, looking nervous but pleased in a pale pink gown.

And then Danny walked up next to Alex and took her hand, pulling her off in the direction of the dance floor.

Mindy gaped.

Alex! And Danny! Neither of them had breathed a word of it to her; for Alex, that was a major BFF foul, and while Mindy couldn’t really say she’d expected Danny to break his vow of silence and actually fill her in, she thought she’d trained him better than that.

On the dance floor, Mindy could see Alex putting her hands up in the air, and Danny - huh. Danny wasn’t dancing like Mindy knew he could. He was mostly stepping back and forth with Alex, doing the typical teenage boy shuffle, with only a couple muted little flourishes. Apparently Danny had been serious when he said he didn’t want people around here to know about the whole dancing thing.

“Shall we?” Brendan asked in her ear, and Duncan beamed next to them and held out his hands to both of them, gesturing toward the dance floor.

Seriously: worst dance _ever_.


	4. Sophomore Year: Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The posters for spring play auditions popped up right after winter break.

The posters for spring play auditions popped up right after winter break, photocopied flyers with GREASE IS THE WORD printed in all caps and photos of John Travolta doing a _Saturday Night Fever_ disco point pasted next to a stock photo of a laughing girl in a pink poodle skirt.

“Did you ever think that the name the Pink Ladies was a sexual thing?” Maggie asked, snapping her gum loudly. “You know.” She pointed to her crotch with double finger guns. “ _Pink Ladies_.”

“Eew, Maggie,” Mindy said. “And no. They’re _ladies_. Hey, Danny, you should try out to be one of those greaser guys. You’d be a natural.”

“Not gonna happen,” he said.

“Ooooh, _Daaaaaanny_ ,” Jeremy trilled, in a high, girlish tone. “Danny. Danny! Why-ey-ey…”

“If you don’t try out for the part of Danny, Danny, I will cry real tears, okay?” Mindy said. “Real. Tears. Tears of _sadness_ , Danny.”

“Baseball,” Danny shrugged, offering up his sad little one word excuse like it was a fundamental and unbreakable law of the universe.

“Do you think they’re going to let you smoke cigarettes onstage?” Maggie asked.

“They should,” Alex said. 

Mindy was valiantly trying to ignore the way Alex and Danny had been glued together at the hip since they’d come back from Christmas break, but neither of them were making it easier by standing next to each other when they totally didn’t need to be. It wasn’t like they were touching right now or anything, but _still_. Mindy’s winter dance with Brendan had been a major bust, there was no reason for the two of them to rub their dating-for-three-weeks success story in her face.

Maggie shifted her grip on her book bag. “I want to try out for Rizzo and sing her song about being all slutty and preggo in high school.”

“Ah, but don’t forget city league football tryouts are next week, my sweet American biscuit,” Jeremy said, throwing an arm over Maggie’s shoulders.

Maggie punched Jeremy’s side, a little too hard, as the bell rang for their first class. “It’s called soccer, you pretentious dick.”

*

Mr. Shulman seemed pretty pleased when she showed up at auditions, so Mindy was pumped about that. She grabbed a seat in the audience and tried to ignore Danny and Alex a couple rows ahead of her, heads bent toward each other, talking quietly. Gross.

Mindy was paired with this senior kid who was swinging around a lantern jaw like he was going to knock people out with the angle of his chin. They did the duet for “Summer Nights” together with Mr. Shulman chanting the tell-me-more’s, which was an experience Mindy could’ve lived her whole life without, but she looked out in the audience at one point and noticed Danny and Alex staring up at her instead of gazing all lovey-dovey at each other, so at least she was saving the world from more of their disgusting couple-ness.

Mr. Shulman winked at her as she walked off the stage.

*

Audition results went up a week later on the big bulletin board outside of the gym, and Mindy fought her way to the front and scanned for her name. There, in the middle: _Mindy Lahiri_. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened them again.

Next to her name it said: _Frenchy_.

There was no understudy notation next to her character name. She’d gotten the part. The actual part! She couldn’t believe it. Mindy had watched _Grease_ again to prep for the musical, and Frenchy got to wear a bunch of crazy colored wigs and sounded like she was huffing helium constantly, which was a life skill Mindy had basically already mastered, so this was all definitely in her wheelhouse.

Jeremy hadn’t tried out this year, because he and Maggie were plotting world soccer domination, but it looked like Brendan had snagged the understudy role for Sonny, who had to be one of the T-Birds (hopefully _that_ wouldn’t be awkward), and Alex had landed an understudy role as well for Marty. In fact, it looked like Mindy was one of only two underclassmen who had ended up on the stage, along with a freshman girl named Katie, who was going to be an unnamed Pink Lady background extra. 

Frenchy! Mindy floated on air all the way to her next class.

* * *

Danny was slouched down low in his seat the next day in American History, a grimy baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. Mindy tapped the brim of his hat as she walked by.

“What’s with the whole disinterested drug dealer look this morning?” she asked, and plopped her books down on the desk behind him. “I mean, don’t get me wrong, I dig it, but you’ve usually got a bit more of the New Jersey prep thing going on, you know?”

Danny mumbled something that Mindy couldn’t quite understand.

She leaned in closer, putting a foot underneath her in her seat. “Huh?”

“Alex and I broke up last night,” Danny said, low and begrudging. Mindy saw Alex walk through the door of the classroom then. Alex looked over at Mindy and Danny, turned away, and started to move towards the back of the classroom, taking an empty seat next to Tamra.

“Oh,” Mindy said, not exactly sure how she was supposed to feel about the news. It wasn’t like she’d been a huge proponent of the whole Danny-and-Alex _thing_ , but it also wasn’t like she could exactly say that now. Still, breaking up just before Valentine’s Day was always the pits. “Sorry, man.”

“It’s okay.”

She supposed she had to ask. “You wanna talk about it?”

Danny hesitated, then shook his head. “Not really.”

Thank _god_. “Well, I’m here if you need me,” Mindy said, pretty sure she was the best friend ever for just making the offer. Alex was avoiding looking at either of them on the other side of the classroom; Mindy would have to try to snag her after the bell. “And take your hat off, dude, before the teacher gets in or somebody, like, tries to buy some pot off of you.”

* * *

Mindy pulled out her phone and kicked her heels against the plywood box that had CARNIVAL BOOTH - ACT V SCENE III - END SCENE spray painted on the side. Her twitter feed was blowing up with photos of three-fifths of the members of One Direction shirtless at some beach in Australia, board shorts hanging precariously off their slim little hip bones, and she was zooming in to figure out Harry’s extensive tattoo situation.

“Stop kicking the sets,” a voice said. “You do know people like me have put hard work into that thing you’re sitting on, right?”

Mindy looked down at the plain plywood box, then up at the tall kid giving her a judgmental once-over.

Mindy tugged her skirt down and hopped off. “Excuse you, I was only sitting on it because it looked like I could. Joke’s on you for making the set too good, dude.”

The kid tilted his head to the side, considering her evenly, and Mindy realized with a funny jolt just how cute this guy was - super tall, with a mop of hair that curled at the ends, and a reserved, measured look that was sort of unexpectedly doing it for her. Maybe looking at too many pictures of Liam in his adorable shaggy hair phase had finally gotten to her.

Mindy sniffed. “Whatever. Look, I gotta be back on set soon. Enjoy living in your world of untouchable plywood, man.”

“What’s your name?” he asked, instead.

Uh. “Mindy,” she said, trying not to sound too taken aback. “Mindy Lahiri.”

“You’re a grade below me, right?”

“Since I have no clue who you are, aside from being, like, a set Nazi, that’s kind of a tough question for me to answer.”

“I’m Casey,” he said, and stuck his hand out like he actually wanted to shake her hand or something, like it was totally normal to behave like life was one big FBLA meeting. She reached out and shook his hand, 90% out of shock.

“Nice to meet you, I guess.” Casey had a great handshake, his grip firm but not too tight. Didn’t that mean he was also a great kisser? Wasn’t that something she’d read in an issue of _Glamour_ or _Cosmo_ or whatever at one point?

Casey smiled then, for the first time, and Mindy stuttered over what she’d been about to say next.

“Would you want to go out on a date with me sometime?” he asked, and Mindy just about bit her tongue. Was he asking her out? _Seriously_?

“Yes?” she said, before she really stopped to consider what she was actually saying. Oh god!

He nodded his head at her, seriously, and pulled her hand over to him, taking a pen out of the back pocket of his jeans, and wrote something on the palm of her hand. He let go her hand when he was done, and she looked down in a daze. It was a string of numbers - his phone number.

“I’ll see you later, then,” he said, and sauntered away with his hands in his pockets.

*

Mindy sat on the front stoop of her apartment building in a mustard yellow A-line skirt and brown top, idly fingering the hem of her skirt. She’d texted Gwen an emergency selfie outfit check on the combination, which was high risk (risk: looking like a hot dog squeezed into a too-tight bun)/high reward (reward: looking way cute for her first date with a guy she really, _really_ liked) and she wasn’t sure if she was pulling it off. She hadn’t heard back from Gwen, even though it had been at least a couple hours since she’d texted. Maybe it was awful. She probably looked terrible. Did she have enough time to run back upstairs and change?

She’d just about talked herself into it when the door to the building opened up behind her and Charlie sat down next to her. He was wearing his uniform blues, the ones that made his ass look like a million bucks.

Charlie was an older, wiser, cosmopolitan man, right? He could probably give her an unbiased opinion on this kind of stuff.

Mindy stood up.

“Charlie,” she announced, “I need your help. I can’t get anybody to tell me this doesn’t look awful, and I’m about to go on a date with this super cute guy, and I don’t want him to think that I look like a hot dog somebody barfed mustard all over, so give it to me straight - am I hideous or what?”

“You are not hideous, and you know it,” he said. “But turn around, let me have a look at you.”

She twirled for him, and he nodded.

“It’s good,” Charlie said solemnly. “You look good.”

Compliments from hot guys were _definitely_ the way to kick off a date you were nervous about.

She sat and chatted with Charlie until Casey swung by finally to pick her up (he’d wanted to pick her up at her apartment, but Mindy was not going to risk any boy meeting her parents until probably after they were already married). Mindy waved goodbye to Charlie behind Casey’s back, and Charlie gave her a little two-finger salute, which Mindy was pretty sure was meant to compliment her on her amazing taste in dudes as personified by Casey, who was looking fine in tight jeans that clung to his long legs and a button-down, hair combed back neatly.

Casey walked her over to Carl Schurz Park and whipped out a plaid picnic blanket. There was a big screen set up, so Mindy knew they were doing some sort of a movie in the park deal, but Casey refused to tell her what movie they were showing no matter how much Mindy tried to tease it out of him.

At the end of the movie, when Westley and Princess Buttercup finally kissed, Casey leaned in and kissed Mindy lingeringly on the mouth. His lips were slick and warm and he tasted like the salted, buttery popcorn he’d fought his way through the crowds to get them halfway through the film (even though it had been kind of weird when he’d stopped to pray before digging into the popcorn, but whatever, she could deal with guys who were super into God). He snuck a hand around her waist and they kissed on a blanket, underneath the stars, and it was everything Mindy could have ever hoped for.

* * *

“Hey, Lahiri!” Danny knocked twice on her desk. “Earth to Mindy. Hey, come in, Mindy.” He waved a hand in front of her face, two inches from her nose.

Mindy lifted her head off the desk and scowled. It had been a late night of studying for her French exam, and an even later night of talking on the phone with Casey after that. Mindy’s head was swimming with conjugates and verb tenses and more vocabulary words than she was pretty sure a person should be realistically expected to remember at the same time. Her hair was a ratty mess, her bra was on inside-out underneath her shirt, and she didn’t want to talk to anybody, much less a guy, much less Danny freakin’ Castellano.

“You coming to watch practice tonight?” Danny asked, slinging his bag on the floor.

She stared at him blankly.

“Baseball practice,” he clarified.

Her blank stare turned hard. He’d interrupted her precious zoning-out time for _that_?

“ _Varsity_ practice,” he added obnoxiously, like he hadn’t been underhandedly boasting the entire last week about making the spring varsity team as a sophomore. Seriously, she got it, he was slightly better than the average tenth grader at playing baseball. Give it a rest already.

“Oh my god, go away,” she said, and put her head back down.

“Geez,” Danny said, like it was 1950s America and he’d just been caught stealing a pack of bubblegum, only, like, in a really wholesome way where he was about to learn an Important Life Lesson or something. “What’s your problem?”

“Tired,” she said dully into her forearm. “French exam.”

She heard the papers he was shifting around stop rustling for a second, and then Danny said, “I can tell you when Ms. Steadman gets here, so you can try to sleep through the bell, if you want.”

It was a pretty decent offer. Danny wasn’t such a bad guy sometimes. “Thanks,” she said, and tilted her head sideways, laying her cheek flat against the desk.

“No problem, Min,” he said, kind of forced casual, like he was trying something out. It was weird enough that she opened an eye to look up at him. He was turned half away from her, his nose sharp and funny-looking from this angle. She could see the faint scruff of a ten o’clock shadow on his cheeks and chin, like maybe he’d started shaving at some point.

“Okay, _Dan_ ,” she said, and closed her eyes again.

*

Baseball, Mindy was beginning to realize, was pretty boring without Alex. And, sure, Mindy hadn’t exactly been very supportive of Alex’s relationship with Danny, but, c’mon, wasn’t swearing off an entire sport because of a guy you’d only dated for, like, a month and leaving your friend high and dry in the process a _little_ extreme?

So now it was just her, sitting by herself, the wind and distant chatter of the game in her ears. She never thought she’d miss Alex droning annoyingly in her ear about RBIs and OFAs and strikeouts and the subtle art of relief pitching, all the obscure sounding lingo that made baseball seem more like a weird cult than an all-American pastime. That’s how hard up she was.

At least Danny making the varsity team this year had upped the amount of eye candy on the field. The average height of the entire varsity team had to have a good four inches on the JV team, easy. Hel _lo_ , seniors.

Danny waved to her from the field, jogging out to third, and Mindy waved back.

“Looks like we both moved up to the big leagues this year,” a voice said next to her, and Mindy screamed, flailing so hard that the open textbook on her lap fell onto the grass.

“Oh my god, Morgan! You scared the crap out of me, dude!”

“It’s called _situational awareness_. Look it up. You’d never make it out of prison with skills like those.”

“First,” Mindy said, “why is anybody going to put me in prison? Have you seen me? Unless being too cute is a crime, in which case, 100% guilty. Also, weren’t you just in juvie? You do know that juvie isn’t, like, _prison_ -prison, right?”

“Hey, girl!” Tamra said, and jumped up on the bleachers to sit at Mindy’s other side. “What’s up?”

Morgan leaned forward to peer around Mindy and cleared his throat. “Tamra,” he said, nodding his head, his tone weirdly formal all of a sudden. Interesting.

Also a little pervy.

But Tamra ignored Morgan, jumping to her feet and shaking the entire row of metal bleachers. She waved both her arms like a flailing muppet in the direction of a distant, blurry figure in the far outfield.

“RAY RON!” she screamed. “RAY RON! YOU LOOK OVER HERE RIGHT NOW, RAY RON! _RAY RON_!”

“So I’m guessing that’s Ray Ron,” Mindy said mildly, squinting into the horizon.

Morgan stared hard out into left field, frowned, and pulled out a pencil to scrawl a thick, dark X on his equipment manager clipboard.

* * *

Mindy came out of the guidance counselor’s office and spotted Danny slouched in one of the plastic mental-patient chairs lining the wall, his blue varsity jacket zipped up to his throat. He was staring out of the far office window vacantly, mouth strangely lax and half-open in what looked like deep thought, his head slumped back against the wall behind him.

“Danny!” Mindy said cheerfully, and slammed herself down with ladylike strength onto the chair next to Danny. “What’s shaking?”

Danny only jumped about a foot at her arrival, which went to show you the sort of hardcore manly discipline he was rocking. He breathed in a couple times through his nose before answering. “Not much. What’s up with you?”

“That mandatory guidance counselor appointment. Planning my whole amazing and successful future out.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Step one,” she held up a finger, “crush you academically, graduate valedictorian to the applause and adoration of my peers, make out with a super hot guy at my senior prom. Step two, pre-med, at the prestigious Ivy of my choice, where I _Legally Blonde_ the crap out of everyone. Step three, look like Reese Witherspoon. Step four -”

“You’re thinking of going to med school?” Danny interrupted.

“I was thinking about it. Maybe I’ll be a doctor. I pretty much rock with Rishi, so.”

“That’s what I was thinking of doing.” Danny looked embarrassed suddenly for some reason Mindy couldn’t understand. “Being a doctor.”

“Danny, oh my god, that is so awesome!”

“Really?”

“Of course. That means we get to keep being in all the same classes together. I mean, how else am I going to keep tabs on you?”

“Right,” Danny agreed, looking unsure.

“Everything’s coming up Mindy,” she said, pleased.

* * *

The first clue that Mindy had that her birthday was about to turn into the Worst Birthday Ever was a text from Gwen.

Text to: Mindy Lahiri  
From: Gwen Riley

_not going to be able to make it up for your birthday this weekend - killer midterms next week :( sorry, birthday girl! all my love xoxo_

The second clue was the suspiciously red eyes of Jeremy at lunch and the total absence of Mags from any of the classes they shared.

“They broke up,” Danny confirmed, leaning onto her desk to whisper the news, elbows on her chemistry textbook. “Jeremy told me in gym earlier. Apparently it’s bad.”

Mindy headed over to Maggie’s with an emergency break-up kit after school, a tote bag filled to the brim with kleenex, a stack of movies, and pint of Ben and Jerry’s rapidly melting into its own wrapped-up grocery bag. Mindy said she understood when Maggie told her that she didn’t think she could make herself go out the next day for her birthday. It was hard to say no to a girl rocking crazy raccoon eyes and a tissue stuck to the back of her head. Mindy plucked the tissue off and tossed it in the garbage bin on her way out. 

After that, Mindy wasn’t really surprised when Alex begged off with a totally weak excuse about unexpected family stuff. And sure, Mindy knew that her and Alex hadn’t exactly been the best of friends since the whole Danny situation went down, but it still stung, more than she was expecting.

Casey was gone for her birthday too, doing some sort of intense church charity bootcamp thing, which she’d waved off as a brilliant excuse to have a day alone with her girls, for the first time in forever. Instead Mindy stopped at a bakery on her way home from school the next day and bought a cupcake for herself. She was wearing her rainbow socks that had been her birthday present from Rishi last year and an emerald green top, to stave off the lecherous St. Patrick’s Day pinchers. Mindy stood on the sidewalk, closed her eyes, made a wish, and pretend-blew out a pretend-candle on her cupcake.

“Happy birthday to me,” she muttered, and peeled down the wrapper to take a bite.

* * *

“I don’t know why our teachers thought shoving all of us onto the same subway train at rush hour was going to work,” Mindy complained, trying to squeeze herself into the tiny space between Danny and Tamra. “How was this a good idea?”

“You got me,” Danny muttered, swaying as he held onto the pole above Mindy’s head.

Taking the subway with a large class of high schoolers during rush hour was obviously a losing game; they were on their way back from a field trip to the Museum of Natural History, and everybody had ended up jammed onto the C, the teachers fighting valiantly to keep them all together.

“C’mon, Danny,” she said, and pulled at his varsity jacket to get him moving. “There’s got to be something better than this.”

They snuck past Mr. Shulman, who got distracted by two kids starting at shove each other on the other side of the car, and moved down the train, where they found two miraculously open spots between a guy with ripped jeans and a plain black t-shirt listening with orange earbuds to something Mindy was gonna assume was gross death metal or whatever, and an old woman carrying three plastic grocery bags filled with some unidentifiable fluffy substance and what looked like a pet lizard in her lap.

Danny gallantly took the seat next to Lizard Lady, leaving her with Death Metal Guy. Who, on a second look, was actually kind of hot. He had some artsy stubble going on, along with a judicious amount of guyliner. Maybe he wasn’t listening to death metal. Maybe it was indie rock, the battle cry of skinny, artistically rumpled college boys in bands with weird names the world over. Mindy was pretty sure they were the coolest.

The subway car changed tracks and shuddered, loud and metallic in the echoing tunnel.

Mindy was smushed into her seat, Danny’s arm wedged right up against hers and Guyliner Hottie’s shoulder weirdly close to her right ear. She could smell the faintest hint of cologne, which she assumed was Hot Indie Rock Guy until she had the weird, surreal thought that she’d never really been this close to Danny before, which meant there was a small, distant, tiny, infinitesimal chance it could be him. Huh.

The subway car shook again, the lights flickering dimly as the express thundered by on the next track. Mindy wondered what her parents were making for dinner that night. She was hoping for dosai, but she wasn’t sure if -

The subway plunged into darkness.

The train slammed to a halt with the loss of electricity, and the change in momentum pushed Mindy up against Danny’s side, and Cute Indie College Guy up against her right. A middle-aged woman across from them who had been holding onto one of the poles screamed and stumbled sideways, a scared little sound. The hiss of the air conditioning died, leaving an eerie, echo-y void where each gasp and shriek was amplified in the silence. The lights flickered back on a second later, catching everybody frozen in their new positions like a strobe light.

Mindy looked down at her hand, now held tight in Danny’s. His knuckles were white, whiter than his normal white-boy glow, gripping her fingers, his palm over the back of her hand. The lights flickered again, on and then off again into darkness, then back on, but dimmer than before. There was a reddish tint to everything, like what was on right now was the emergency lighting.

Danny’s eyes shifted over to hers, and she looked back at him, and then both of them looked down at their hands, all grasped together and _holding hands_. Crap!

Mindy gently, very gently, started to pull her hand away, but the subway shuddered one more time, the emergency lights shorting out like a horror movie, and Danny breathed in sharply, his muscles tense. She felt him grab for her hand again in the darkness and pull it back to his knee, locking his fingers tight around her own.

Mindy didn’t try to pull her hand away again.

*

Danny had permission from the school to ditch early at a stop closer to his apartment, and Mindy rode the last few stops home from Hell’s Kitchen in a daze. She felt like this weird panic-attack-handholding event was the sort of information she was obligated to share with someone, _anyone_ , only she couldn’t tell Alex, not after her and Danny’s dating thing they’d had, and it didn’t feel right to tell Mags, not after her heinous breakup with Jeremy. This didn’t seem like something she should talk about with Casey, either. Her feet felt like they were moving on autopilot as she walked up out of the subway station and started home. She thought about texting Gwen, but Gwen hadn’t always been responding to her texts lately, and Mindy wanted feedback, she wanted somebody she could talk this out with right _now_.

So after she made it home she grabbed Rishi from her parents, saying that she’d watch the baby while they finished cooking dinner and, ew, flirted over the dosai pan (ugh, it wasn’t like having an arranged marriage meant you had to fit in the same amount of flirting _after_ you were married, it was seriously embarrassing), and put on some Rihanna in the living room. She pulled Rishi up on her hip.

“…And then he held my hand, Rishi. Danny! Old man mean-face Castellano!” She grabbed one of Rishi’s clenched little hands and fist pumped it a couple of times to the chorus. “I mean, what is up with that?”

She popped her hip out and Rishi giggled like a maniac as she bounced him up and down. Rishi was a sucker for a good bounce.

“You might be right,” she said, and twirled them both around. “You’re so smart, Rishi. So Danny’s suffering from weird panic attacks or claustrophobia or whatever. Or maybe he always has to sleep with a nightlight on. Live and let live, right? I couldn’t out him like that. It would definitely not be cool of me.”

Rishi laughed again, and started squirming, so Mindy set him down on his two chubby little legs. He stomped in a way that was not at all in time with the music, holding onto both of her hands.

“Miun! Min mun!” he said, looking up at her, stomping his feet around around like a crazy kid. Mindy felt the warm glow she felt whenever Rishi butchered her name up into something he could sort of pronounce.

“I’m glad we had this talk, Rishi,” she said. “You’re the best little bro a girl could have.” And they both got down to the very serious business of dancing their asses off to the opening of “Pon de Replay.”

* * *

If Mindy had thought the sets were great last year, Casey was blowing it up this year. He’d done a whole sock hop deal that rotated as the cast danced, revealing different parts of the school auditorium it was being held in - the punch bowl, the bleachers, the bandstand. Mindy was stoked. Betsy had turned the heat up with the costumes this year too; Mindy’s Pink Ladies member’s jacket was _baller_.

Mindy was figuring out, too, that the best part about dating the guy doing the sets was that he knew all the places to make out between calls. They were getting better and better at making out without messing up all her stage makeup and knowing when she had to be back to hit her cues, and if there was one thing that could make Mindy love the theater more, it was being kissed like she was driving her boyfriend up-the-wall-crazy between songs.

* * *

Danny pushed his goggles up on the top of his head as they recorked the last of the acetone and Mindy finished up their chart of mapping vapor pressure against temperature. They’d been killing it at chem labs this year, and the best part about having a double class before lunch was that Mrs. Clayton let them out early whenever they finished their lab work, so she and Danny usually scored a free study hour whenever they finished up before the bell.

“You want to go outside today?” Danny asked her as they exited the classroom. Usually they headed for the library to do homework or cram for tests, but they only had a couple minutes before lunch started today, so Mindy was definitely cool with skipping the trek to the library on the other side of the building.

The spring air outside was chilly, but the sun was warm and cheerful, the sky a robin’s egg blue over their heads. Danny sat down next to the school in the little alcove where Morgan had hidden his puppies last year, leaning his back against the brick of the building, but Mindy hesitated, standing next to him until Danny rolled his eyes and threw a long sleeved shirt from his bag down on the ground next to him to sit on.

Mindy pulled out her phone after sitting down, hoping for a response from Gwen to her text asking for advice on rounding the bases with your super hot boyfriend (not that Carl fit the super hot criteria, but Mindy was hard up when it came to girl-resources right now), but there was nothing yet. Casey had told her he'd be out of town during prom this year, but he’d suggested they dress up and go out on a fancy date another night instead. Mindy was wondering what exactly the expectations might be here.

“What’s up?”

Mindy fiddled with the power button her phone, flicking the screen on and off. “Oh, nothing. I mean, it’s just - I’m waiting to hear back from Gwen about something majorly important, and she hasn’t texted me back yet.”

“That sucks,” Danny said. “Sorry.”

Mindy stared down at her blank phone. “We used to be the best BFFs of anybody who ever BFFed, you know? But now we’re, just… _not_ , I guess. I hardly get to talk to her anymore.”

Danny leaned his head back. “It’s like that for me when I go home to Staten now. There are all these guys I grew up with, and I still love those guys like brothers, right, but when I go back now, Stan’s in juvie and Bobby failed ninth and they’re working jobs washing dishes during the summer.”

“Gwen’s new school is posh,” Mindy said, and tugged down on her skirt, riding up against the concrete. “Prep school fancy. _Gossip Girl_ fancy.”

She stared down at her knees, dimpled and scabbed from a recent bout with an icy patch of New York sidewalk, when she felt an elbow nudge her side. She looked over and Danny smiled at her crookedly, his head ducked down to face her. His hair was messed-up and a little clumpy today, darker than normal, and his eyes were creased up in an expression she didn’t see very often on him.

“They ain’t got nothin’ on you,” he said, his voice halfway between joking and serious, and she felt a thump of some sort of massive feeling deep in her chest.

“Yeah?” she said.

He shifted, kicking his feet. “Yeah, sure.”

“Okay,” she said, and tucked her chin down, hugging the feeling swelling in her chest close.

They sat in silence, the brick leaching cold into Mindy’s back, the sun warm on her bare legs. It felt like eating ice cream in the middle of summer, the air heavy and hot around you while your tongue froze and the roof of your mouth ached. Danny closed his eyes, but Mindy didn’t feel like he was ignoring her. It just felt… nice, she guessed. Peaceful.

“Christina-broke-up-with-me-cause-I-didn’t-want-to-have-sex-with-her,” Danny said fast, the words tripping over each other.

“What?” she asked, and felt immediately, horrifically stupid.

Danny swallowed, his eyes still closed, then repeated, a little more calmly, “Christina broke up with me because I didn’t want to have sex with her. You asked me earlier this year, at Homecoming, why we broke up. That was the reason.”

“Oh,” she said.

He opened one of his eyes and glanced over at her. “You can’t tell anyone.”

She shook her head. “I wouldn’t.”

He looked at her closely, seriously, and when he finally looked away from her she felt warm. Like she’d passed a test or something.

A thought occurred to her. “Why’d you break up with Alex, then?”

“She didn’t tell you?”

Mindy shook her head.

“Oh. Well, I didn’t break up with her. She broke up with me.” He sighed, squinting up into the sky, before adding, “I mean, it’s not like it was really a big deal or anything. We only went out on a couple dates, after all. I don’t even think we went out for a month.”

Mindy blinked, re-assessing everything that had happened in the spring with Danny and Alex in light of that. Danny settled back again against the brick wall next to her.

Mindy leaned her head back as well, lulled by this crazy sense of confessional they had going, the way the two of them in their alcove felt like they were alone in the world. And, she realized suddenly, because this was _Danny_. And somehow, over the past year or so, he’d become her friend. And not even, like, a normal this-guy-is-in-most-of-my-classes friend. Danny was her legit, total, BFF-worthy, it’s-weird-because-he’s-a-guy-but-also-not-weird-at-all-because-he’s-Danny FRIEND.

The bell rang in the distance, class over, and Danny held his hand out to help her up.

*

It only occurred to her later that night to wonder - why wouldn’t Danny have wanted to have sex with Christina? Sure, Christina was a grade-A bitch, but she was also skinny like a popsicle stick and had golden blonde hair like she’d just stepped out of a shampoo commercial. Christina was mega-bangable. Plus, she and Danny had dated for almost two years. It was practically a done deal at that point.

All Mindy could figure was that Danny was nuts. Or was way more Catholic than she’d been assuming. Or… or maybe Danny just hadn’t known what he wanted yet.

Maybe he just wasn’t sure.

Except Danny was a _guy_. And everybody knew that teenage boys were total slobbering horndogs.

So maybe not that.

* * *

“Mindy,” Mom said, and shook her again to wake her up. “ _Mindy_.”

“Bleurghh,” Mindy said, trying to burrow herself underneath her pillow. Didn’t her parents know it was way too early in the morning for this, especially on a weekend? She cracked an eyelid open far enough to see that her dad was holding a small pale blue Tiffany’s bag, and sat up in bed as fast as she could.

Rishi climbed up on top of the covers to sit next to her. Mindy pulled her glasses on and tried to blink the sleep out of her eyes.

“This is for you,” Dad said, handing her the bag. Mindy pulled the little jewelry box out of the bag with careful fingers - it was delicate and lovely, and she hadn’t even opened the box up yet. She cracked the lid and saw a single letter written in cursive dangling from a fine chain - a silver M.

“It’s so _beautiful_ ,” she breathed.

“Happy star birthday, baby girl,” Mom said. “It’s from your father and me.” Rishi slammed his hands down on the bed covers. “And Rishi too.”

Dad dropped a kiss on her forehead. “We love you, thangam.”

* * *

The opening night of _Grease_ was a blur of marks to hit and punchlines to land. Mindy wore her new necklace underneath her dress for good luck, touching the silver initial with her fingers each time she walked on stage. When it was all over, Mindy found herself curtseying, buzzing and light-headed with adrenaline and relief, on stage with an armful of roses from her parents and Rishi. They took three separate bows as a line as the audience clapped.

Mr. Shulman held up his hands, palms-out, and the crowd quieted down.

“All of us in the cast and stage crew,” Mindy heard Casey whoop in the distance, “would like to thank you again for your support of our small, humble offering to the theatre gods. However, I come bearing sad news as well - I’m sad to announce that this will be my last production with East Park High, as I’ll be retiring from teaching after this year. You have all been a joy to me, but it’s time for me to explore a new part of my life’s journey.”

Mindy looked at out the crowd, expecting to see a reflection of the same shock she felt, but most of the parents looked either politely interested or mildly bored. She took one last curtsy and left the stage full of uncertainty.

*

Mindy’s head was spinning, trying to process Mr. Shulman’s announcement backstage as she unpinned the apricot Frenchy wig from her own tightly braided hair when Casey threw himself at her out of nowhere.

“Babe! You were amazing,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her, getting stage makeup all over his lips and cheeks.

Mindy pushed him away with a grin. “The _sets_ were amazing, Casey. I think the entire audience gasped when Danny and Sandy’s car flew off at the end. It was,” she sighed, “the epitome of romance.”

Casey hit his chest once and pointed a single finger up at the sky as she rubbed at a particularly stubborn patch of blush that had ended up on his face. “Gotta thank my main man in the sky on that one.”

“Right. Because Jesus totally helped you build the sets.”

“Who do you think I got the idea to do carpentry from?”

“…Uh. Jesus?”

“Speaking of which, I’ve got news for you.”

“As in, speaking of Jesus, you have news for me?”

Casey grabbed her hands and leaned forward so his nose touched hers. “I’m going to Haiti this summer. We did it, Mindy. We got the funding!”

Mindy blinked, then started to feel a low buzz of excitement. “That’s actually happening? This summer?”

“And you should come! I talked to our pastor and he said he can get you in with the people helping with medical care in Haiti, so it’ll look baller on your college applications. Mindy, it would be amazing if you could come with us.”

“Oh my god,” she said, clasping Casey’s hands, finally starting to process what he was saying, “you’re going to Haiti for the summer!”

*

“No,” Mom said. “Absolutely not. You are not going to Haiti, you’re not going with a church group, and you’re not going with a _boy_.”

“But - “ Mindy started.

“No means no,” Dad said. “And that’s the end of it.”

* * *

Exam week passed in a blur of late nights and stress headaches and hardcore memorization. When Friday finally arrived Mindy was half-sure it still wasn’t over, that she wouldn’t be stuck in a loop studying for her sophomore year finals for her entire future, like some sort of awful exam-based Groundhog’s Day nightmare.

At least Jeremy’s end of the year party was rock- _ing_.

His family must be loaded, because their east side apartment was the size of a legit roller skating rink, with sunken floors and long couches lining the walls. Somebody handed her a red cup of beer when she walked in the door, and then she bumped right into Jeremy, wringing his hands and looking around at all the people anxiously.

“Jeremy! Dude! I can’t believe you’ve been holding out on us. This place is amazing!”

Jeremy kept wincing whenever somebody in the room yelled too loud. “Yeah, thanks. Listen, could you just, ah, help me keep things quiet?”

“Seriously?”

“Please, Mindy.”

“You have a keg, Jeremy. I’m not sure what you were expecting to happen. Also, how did you get a _keg_?”

“Morgan,” Jeremy said, which she really should have guessed. “And I expected a little more _decorum_ ,” he hissed, eyeing two jocks who looked like they were working themselves up to attempting a keg stand in the kitchen. She took pity on the guy. Keg stands were nobody’s best friend.

“Yeah, sure, I’ll see what I can do. Hey, where’s the bathroom?”

Jeremy pointed at a hallway on the opposite side of the room. Mindy locked herself in, poured out the beer she’d been mysteriously handed into the toilet (hello, _date rape_ ), ditched the cup, and fixed her lipgloss. She made a pouty face at her reflection in the mirror. It sucked she’d had to wear her big honking grandma glasses tonight because she’d accidentally scratched her eye when Rishi had bulldozed into her knees earlier when she’d been attempting to put in her contacts.

She stepped back out and spotted Danny across the living room, disheveled and loose, wearing his varsity jacket. Danny had a cup of the flat Budweiser from the keg dangling from his fingertips, and his eyes were a little glassy, but he lit up big time when he saw her, toasting her with his cup and yelling, “Miiiiindy!” It was pretty sweet. She headed over to him and punched his arm in greeting, and he threw an arm over her shoulders like she was one of the guys, pulling her into his side to point at her head.

“This is Mindy,” he shouted to some dude in a backwards cap who was rocking the skater boy vibe pretty hard. It sounded like he tried to introduce Mindy to the guy next, but everything he said ended up slurred and lost, so Mindy just smiled and waved like the Queen of England.

“Where’s the boyfriend?” Danny asked, ducking down to ask the question way too loudly into her ear.

Her parents’ rejection still stung. Seriously, why was it so important that she had to shipped off to India like a depressing orphan child every summer? “Haiti things,” she said. “Doing Haiti stuff.”

Danny nodded, pressing his lips together, and gestured toward her empty hand. “You want a drink?”

The beer was disgusting, lukewarm and watery, but Danny looked pretty eager to fight his way over to the keg and grab her something, so whatever, she could hold a second cup for a while. Plus it would help Jeremy use up the keg quicker. “Sure.”

Mindy waved at Jeremy, who was chatting with Betsy on the other side of the room, and spotted Morgan standing against the wall, watching Tamra dance with some skinny white kid with a knit cap and terrible pedo-looking facial hair.

Danny returned in record speed, handing her the cup and launching into this long-winded and only half-understandable word vomit about their final lab project, growing salt crystals with different chemical additives. It was kind of funny how she and Danny ended up being partners on projects where they were supposed to take care of things - first little Chloe Lahiri-Castellano, now their five One Direction crystals.

Danny was in the middle of stressing out about their grade considering that Zayn had formed half-sideways in a worrying expression of salt crystal independence ( _totally_ the bad boy of the group, she was killer at naming things), when the skater guy that Danny had sort-of introduced her to earlier started headbanging next to her and bumped her cup, sending the remnants of her beer all over her shirt.

“Oh. My GOD,” she said, and flapped her arms usefully at her side like the motion would wring the alcohol out from her.

Danny was in front of her instantly, shoving the kid backwards, puffed up to his full tiny height, which should have been ridiculous, only Danny looked wiry and strong and like he’d be a scrapper, like he was used to getting into it. “What the hell, man?”

The guy threw his hands up and stepped away. “Sorry, dude.”

Mindy shoved past both of them. “It’s fine,” she said, and beelined for the bathroom, Danny trotting along at her heels. She knocked twice on the bathroom door and locked it behind them, rifling through the cabinet until she unearthed a clean hand towel and wet it in the sink.

Danny leaned back against the towel bar, ankles crossed, as she dabbed futilely at the front of her shirt.

She cupped her hands together then, pooling water between her fingers, and then leaned over the sink and tried to splash herself like the most awkward mermaid ever. She wrung out the front of her shirt then, twisting it up like that time in the fourth grade when they’d made fake tie-dyed shirts with rubber bands and watercolors. Mindy gave herself one last, helpless pat with the towel. There was a giant wet patch all over the front of her shirt, the wet fabric clinging to the curves of her stomach. It wasn’t fair, not when she’d already had to overcome the cuteness handicap imposed on her by having to wear her old, awful glasses today as well.

She could hear the muted sounds of the party outside: the low buzzing of voices, the occasional shout from the kitchen, the steady bass beat of some techno song. It all seemed very far away.

“Hey, Min,” Danny said, and Mindy started. She’d actually forgotten he was in the bathroom with her. “You’ve got… something...”

And before Mindy could react, Danny reached up and slid her glasses off her face.

He cleaned her glasses with the hem of his t-shirt, blowing on the lenses to fog each one up and then rubbing them dry one more time. His face was bent to his work, his lips pressed together in the same solemn frown he wore when he was working on equations in math class. Then he carefully slid the glasses back on her face, catching the plastic hooks behind her ears, visibly concentrating on the simple motion with the vast intellectual focus of the really, _really_ drunk.

Danny’s hands were hovering by her face, his face close to her own, his expression weirdly serious.

Mindy was opening her mouth to say something, _anything_ , when Danny leaned over and pressed his mouth up against hers. His lips were closed, and her mouth was half-open to speak, so his lips mostly hit her teeth, sliding slickly across them.

And then Danny opened his mouth too, warm and boozy, and caught her bottom lip and _leaned_ into her.

She froze. She couldn’t think about anything except for the fact that Danny was kissing her (he was _kissing_ her??) and he was basically the same height as her (she’d only ever been kissed by guys who were taller than her, even Josh had had a good couple inches on her) and then Danny cupped his hand around the back of her neck (threading his fingers through her hair, sliding his fingers against the skin there) and… Casey. 

_Casey_.

Mindy jerked her head back. Danny’s face was red, his breath short, staring at her intently. Mindy could taste cheap beer on her lips.

“I…” Danny started to say, and she could see realization flood across his face, followed by panic, followed swiftly by a flush of nausea. Then Danny gagged and ran past her, straight for the toilet, and started blowing chunks at her feet.

Great. Just... great.

*

Rishi was usually a brat after his afternoon nap, fussy and prone to crying fits until he woke up enough to be his normal, cheerful toddler self, so Mom had dumped Rishi on Mindy’s bed while she painted. Mindy was tickling Rishi back into a good mood, poking his feet while he kicked and alternated screaming and giggling at her.

“Kondai,” Mom said, opening her door just far enough to stick her head in, “there’s a boy here to see you.”

Casey knew better than to swing by her apartment unannounced, didn’t he? “Who is it?”

“He says he’s your lab partner.”

Oh. The last time she’d seen Danny was Friday night when she’d handed him off after he’d puked up half the food in the greater New York area (after he’d _kissed_ her, a small, distant part of her brain chimed in, which she stalwartly ignored). She’d managed to hunt down Stevie and hand Danny over to him for safekeeping after the bathroom vomitpalooza, giving Stevie firm instructions to get Danny home safely.

“Thanks, Mom. C’mon, Rishi,” she said, and lifted him off her bed, setting him down on his two chubby little feet. “Let’s go say hi to Danny.”

Mom walked out with her to the living room where Danny sat on their couch, looking out of place and awkward. He’d dressed nice, in a henley and dark skinny jeans, but looked hella nervous, his complexion a chalky white. Danny stood up when they entered the room.

“Can I get you two some chai?” Mom asked.

Danny looked torn, like he didn’t know if it would be more polite to accept or refuse the offer. “That would be great, Mom, thanks,” Mindy said, preempting Danny having to make the correct social call on that one.

Mom disappeared into the kitchen, leaving the two of them looking at one another silently. Danny looked tense, like he was either going to split and run or curl up in a ball and prepare to take a beating. Mindy held Rishi’s tiny hand in her own.

“Blaaguuhaaa,” Rishi said, and broke into a blinding smile aimed at Danny, showing off his two baby teeth that had come in like little white signposts in his gummy mouth.

Danny took a step closer to both of them then and crouched down on his heels, putting himself at eye level with Rishi. “Hey, buddy,” Danny said. “We haven’t really gotten a chance to meet yet. I’m Danny.”

“Graddy!” Rishi said, which was a pretty awesome first effort at saying Danny’s name.

Danny grinned at Rishi crookedly. “Yeah, that’s right. I got a brother that used to be your age. You know what? You guys have almost the same name. His name is Richie.”

“Graddy!” Rishi yelled again, keeping a good thing going.

Mom came back in with two cups of milky chai and a small plate of nankhatai cookies. “I gave you a little less sugar in your chai than Mindy, Danny, since she has a bit of a sweet tooth,” Mom said, setting the dishes down on the low table in front of the couch. She also had a screw-top cup of warm milk flavored with a little cinnamon for Rishi.

“Thanks, Mom,” Mindy said, reaching for her tea and settling down cross-legged on the floor. Rishi settled down next to her, holding his cup up to his face with both hands and drinking quietly.

“Thanks, Mrs. Lahiri,” Danny said.

“I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me,” Mom said.

Danny cleared his throat, and shot a nervous look in the direction her mom had just gone.

“Look, I wanted to…” Danny shifted around on the couch. “I wanted to apologize for… for Friday. I’m not used to drinking that much.” He said the last couple words in a low, miserable voice.

“You threw up on my Mary Janes.”

He looked at her blankly. “What - is that a... drug thing?”

“It’s a _shoe_ thing.” She darted a glance at the kitchen. “Mary Janes are a type of _shoe_ , you idiot.”

Danny shook his head, obviously dismissing the entire world of women’s fashion as entirely incomprehensible and possibly heavily drug-influenced. “I’m sorry.”

“You also kissed me.” Mindy crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you have to say about that?”

A faint blush started working its way up his neck. “I… I barely remember that, honestly. I actually thought it might have been something I made up.”

“Why on earth would you make up something like that?”

“I don’t know!” Danny snapped, showing signs of his normal angry-old-man approach to life. “Casey’s a good guy, okay? He’s in right with the Big Dude,” ugh, she could practically hear the capital letters when Danny said the words, what was it with Catholic boys, “and I’d never do something like that to him.”

“Uh, except you didn’t do it to Casey, you did it to _me_ , weirdo.”

Danny took a deep breath. “You’re right. You’re right, you’re totally right, and I’m sorry. I really am.”

Mindy took a sip of her tea.

“It was stupid, and I was drunk, and I’m sorry,” he continued. “You gotta believe me, Mindy.”

She dug into a crumbling tea cookie and munched it thoughtfully. Danny looked pretty miserable; it was obvious the guy was feeling some keen regret. Whatever. She could be magnanimous. “Okay, yeah. I believe you.”

Danny slumped back against the couch. “So we’re cool? For real?”

“We’re friends, Danny. So yeah. We’re cool.” Next to her, Rishi slammed his sippy cup with a hard bang on the low wooden table and started to kick his legs restlessly. Mindy scooped Rishi up into her lap, holding onto his wiggling butt with both arms.

“I actually have something to tell you,” she said. “I have big news, Danny. You know how my parents wouldn’t let me go to Haiti for the summer?”

Danny nodded, mouth full of nankhatai cookie.

“Well, they changed their minds.” Mindy beamed, and Rishi started to play his favorite game of attempting to stick his entire fist in his mouth, occasionally breaking off to update her on his status with a gurgled string of the the couple words he sort of knew. “They told me yesterday. I think they finally realized how dope volunteering in Haiti was going to look on my college applications.”

Danny swallowed hastily and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. “You’re going to Haiti? For the whole summer? With Casey?”

“I mean, we’ll be chaperoned the whole time, ‘cause it’s run through Casey’s church, whatever, boring. But this means I don’t have to go to Mumbai for the summer and hang out with my lame-o cousins. You can’t even imagine how awesome this is, Danny.”

Danny looked like he didn’t know how to take her news, which was weird, because it was indisputably the best thing that Mindy could have imagined happening.

“Can I write you?” he asked abruptly.

“What?”

“Can I write you? Or, I don’t know, text you? In Haiti, I mean - are you going to have email? Is your phone going to work?”

“Oh. Uh, I don’t know? But, either way - yeah, of course, dude. Tamra and Jeremy are going to be around this summer, so you have to keep me up on all the East Park High gossip. I mean, how else am I supposed to know if Morgan finally makes a move on Tamra or not? These are important things to know, Danny.”

A small corkscrew of a smile dimpled itself into existence at the corner of Danny’s mouth. “I can do that.”

“Sweet,” she said, and downed the last remnants of her chai.

* * *

“Hey, babe,” Casey said, tucking an orange travel pillow behind his head, “I’m about to crash out hardcore. Grab me some H2O when the cart rolls around?”

“You got it,” Mindy said, and pulled out her earbuds as Casey settled himself into the window seat next to her. She grabbed the stationery she’d picked out after Casey had told her, in a moment unsurpassed in her life so far in terms of sheer horror, they’d be lucky to have electricity in Haiti, much less internet access or a cell signal. Mindy unfolded the plastic table in front of her, tapped her pen against the paper twice, and resigned herself to living the Jane Austen life over the summer. If Elizabeth Bennet could rock a mean set of stationary, so could Mindy Lahiri.

 _Dear Danny,_ she wrote, _We’re only on the plane and I already have so much to tell you…_


	5. Senior Year: Fall

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mindy starts senior year.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're skipping forward to Mindy's senior year to wrap this story up. Thank you again to our wonderful beta reader, [ghostcat](http://ghostcat3000.tumblr.com/).

“Ready, kondai?”

Mindy triple-checked her book bag, her purse, and her outfit. A girl could never be too careful: senior year was the big one, after all. Rishi watched her solemnly from under black bangs from the doorway, one shy fist holding on to Mom’s hand.

Mindy nodded, then reached for Rishi’s other hand. “Ready. And what about you, bro? Ready to crush your first day of daycare today?”

Rishi hid his face in the folds of Mom’s sari. With his huge brown eyes and cute little bowl cut, Rishi had grown into a kid that Mindy was pretty sure should be, like, modeling the fall Ralph Lauren kid’s line. They’d all been patiently explaining to him for the past week that, because Mom was working in a gallery now and Mindy was heading back to school and couldn’t babysit him anymore like she had all summer, he’d be going to daycare before preschool for the first time. Mindy wasn’t sure Rishi had really got it, but he definitely knew _something_ was up. She hoped Mom didn't have to deal with a meltdown once the penny dropped for him.

They walked together to the subway stop where Mindy hugged both of them, then fist-bumped Rishi and waved goodbye to her mom.

She caught up with Peter walking the last block to school from the subway, and slipped up behind him, elbowing him in the side as she came up to walk next to him. Peter threw his arm over her shoulders. He’d transferred to East Park High last year, and had been assigned to the same lab as her, where he’d quickly become friends with her and Danny and Jeremy. Peter had even manned up and took her to prom last year, just so she could go when she wouldn’t have been able to otherwise - he was just that kind of guy.

“Hey, have you seen Danny around yet?” She’d been texting Danny constantly over the summer, but they’d only managed to meet up a couple times, between his bumper-to-bumper schedule at the deli and her babysitting and SAT-prep classes.

“Not yet, but the D-man and I were going to grab some pizza after school. You in?”

“I wish I could, but I have a _date_.” She paused significantly. “With _Cliff_.”

“Cliff’s the new boy toy?”

“If by _boy toy_ you mean _possible love of my life_ , then yes. Yes, he is.”

“If I could tell you one thing, Mindy, it would be hit it and quit it, girl.”

“Just because I went to prom with you last year doesn’t mean you get to be all judge-y of my current relationships.”

“One,” Peter held up a finger, “we went to the prom as friends, and because I am an amazing dancer, friend, and human being. Two, you know you were crying half the time about how you’d broken up with what’s-his-name -”

“Casey.”

“- right, that douchebag.”

“He wasn’t a douchebag. Casey was into _God_.”

“Same diff, M.”

“Not the same diff!” But even though Peter didn’t know the whole story, he sort of had a point. It was surreal to her, as a proud and self-sufficient high school senior with a banging bod and the self-confidence to match, that she’d slept with Casey last year and he’d dumped her only a couple of months later, claiming he needed to spend more time with his main man, J.C. At least Mindy had the school to herself again this year since Casey had moved for college, headed to Los Angeles to dual major in Divinity and something called DJ Studies.

Her junior year, she’d decided this summer, had been the first scene of the romantic comedy of her life: she was the heroine (obvs.), she’d been brutally, cruelly dumped, the opening credits had played over shots of her moping in coffee shops while it rained and sad piano music played, and now the real story was about to start. She’d already met Mr. Right (aka Cliff), they were going to have lots of hilarious misadventures and learn Important Lessons About Life, and the whole thing was going to end with Mindy getting the bejeezus kissed out of her at the senior prom while triumphant music played and balloons fell from the ceiling all around them. It only made sense. 

Peter shrugged. “Human beings aren’t made for long-term relationships. The sooner you learn that fact, the better.”

 _Ugh._ Remind her again why she was friends with so many boys?

“The sooner she learns what fact?” a voice said behind her, and Mindy spun around to face Danny, fingers hooked in the straps of his book bag.

“Danny!” she said, and went in for the hug before Danny could get his defenses up. Surprisingly, he actually let it happen, and even hugged her back a little and patted her awkwardly a couple times before letting go. All of those years of invasive hug training had been worth the payoff.

“The sooner this one,” Peter pointed at Mindy, “learns that looking for love in all the wrong places is for chumps and fictional characters in lady movies.”

Mindy sniffed. “I’m a romantic, Peter. I think the world is a better place because of it.”

“Is this about that Cliff guy?” Danny asked.

“Of course it is,” said Peter. “Can’t you feel the waves of blahness from here? How’d you met this one again, M?”

“My SAT-prep class this summer.”

“I rest my case.”

“And what a delightful class it was,” Jeremy’s voice said from behind them, as he caught up to the three of them at the front of the school. “Mindy and I were - what did you call it? Ah, yes. SAT brothers-in-arms.”

“Sisters-in-arms. Represent.” Mindy and Jeremy did their super secret SAT handshake.

“Gee, cool your jets,” Danny said, like he was somebody’s hundred-year-old grandpa. “Some of us can’t afford your fancy what-have-you SAT classes.”

“We missed you too, buddy,” Mindy said, then hooked her arm up around the back of Danny’s neck, only having to hop up a little to land the move, and ruffled Danny’s hair. Danny shook her off and scowled at her like he was annoyed, but he actually looked secretly pleased, just like Mindy knew he would.

* * *

“Everybody’s so excited to meet you,” Cliff said, looking fine in a tight-fitting suit, holding her hand as they walked to the FBLA’s meet-and-greet for the new school year. Even though they’d only been going out for only a couple of months, it was Mindy’s first real relationship since she’d broken up with Casey last year, so she was keen to make a good impression. Cliff was so great - he was brutally smart, with a body like a tall, skinny tree, and he already knew he was going to be a lawyer when he grew up. Nothing said _power couple_ like a future doctor and a future lawyer hooking up. They were basically destined for greatness together..

Mindy smoothed down her pink wool skirt. “Really? They’re excited to meet me?”

“Well, sure. You know, _you_ meaning my girlfriend. Not, like, _you_ you, I guess.”

She frowned, trying to work that one out. “So, me-Cliff’s-girlfriend me.”

“Exactly,” Cliff agreed happily, and led her into one of the history classrooms off the left wing of the school. Somebody had strung up a banner that said “The Business of a New School Year!” and everybody was wearing either cocktail dresses or suits drinking what looked like wine out of clinking glasses but was almost certainly fruit punch, talking in low, golf-clap voices. It was like the high school, twilight zone version of _Mad Men_ or something.

Everybody looked up as she and Cliff entered the room, the chat stilling into silence for one fraught moment before continuing a little louder than before, and Mindy tightened her hold on her glittery silver clutch before following Cliff in.

*

“And Cliff’s friends are all so _weird_ ,” she complained, stabbing a limp piece of cafeteria broccoli with a dented fork, trying to nurse her bruised feelings of unease. “They’re like the high school Brooks Brothers versions of Stepford wives. Like the history wing turns into some fancy boardroom once the sun goes down. Some of them were even wearing ties, you guys. _Ties_.”

“FBLA for _life_ , son,” Peter said, and threw up something that looked like the whitest gang sign ever invented.

Danny looked up from his school lunch. “They don’t like you? Fuck ‘em.”

“Was that how you dealt with Christina’s friends?” she asked, honestly curious, because she still didn’t understand the whole Christina and Danny _thing_ , especially after the junior year whirlwind tour where they’d gotten back together, slept together (and Mindy _really_ didn’t understand that part, like, _what_ ), and broke up again in a matter of weeks.

Danny looked down again. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“That’s fine, because out of the two options here, I’d like to hear more from Peter. Teach me your future-frat boy ways, Obi-Wan.”

Peter scratched the front of his Dartmouth sweatshirt contemplatively, looking her over. “You could wear something that doesn’t look like a rainbow just barfed all over a little girl’s dress.”

“My fashion sense is impeccable. Pass.”

“Then I don’t know, M. Be white and blonde and skinny, wear monochromatic colors like charcoal grey and black from expensive brand names, talk about super boring stuff like the economy or whatever. Be a legacy at some crazy awesome Ivy League school. Have a lot of money for some reason nobody understands.”

“Please, if I were any skinnier, I’d be Kate Moss’s skeleton.”

Peter shrugged. “That’s all I’ve got, M.”

“Fine. Whatever, I guess I’ll be the invisible shrinking woman. Hey, Danny. Do you know what this means?”

Danny eyed her warily.

“It means,” she said with glee, “it’s time for a workout montage.”

*

“Nope, I was wrong,” she gasped, and leaned forward to hug her knees. “I was wrong, I was so wrong. Oh my god, I think I’m going to _die_.”

She couldn’t believe she’d dragged herself out of bed early on a Saturday for _this_. Danny had even made them run right past the closed-up Shake Shack as they circled Madison Square Park. It was like rubbing salt in an open wound.

“We haven’t even been running for five minutes,” Danny said, not sounding out of breath or anything, the _bastard_ , rubbing his smug I-work-out-on-a-regular-basis privilege in her face. “What were you expecting?”

She sucked in another deep breath of sweet, sweet oxygen tinged ever-so-subtly with fry oil. “Uh, I thought we were going to montage this thing, Danny. Like, I run for a minute, and then the scene would jump to me, like, doing a pushup or something, and then we cut back to us running and you’re all like, 'Mindy, you just ran ten miles!' and I look super cute in my workout clothes and not even sweaty at all. Maybe there’s a hip-hop remix of some 80s song playing or something. Then Cliff shows up and we make out for a while. I don’t know!”

“C’mon,” Danny said, putting an arm around her shoulder and dragging her back up to standing. “We’ll walk for a while, and when you feel like it, we can try running again.”

“Does that mean never? Because I’m pretty sure I’ll never feel like running again.”

“Move it, Lahiri,” Danny said grimly, and gave her a gentle push.

Danny hustled her around the circumference of the park another time, and then made her do some girl pushups next to a metal bench. Sit-ups were better; they hooked their ankles around each other’s and slapped palms when they came up, like the jump-rope games that Mindy used to play as a kid.

They walked over to an open Walgreens for bottles of water and lay back in a small grassy patch in the middle of the park. The grass was dewy against Mindy’s back, but she didn’t mind it. It was actually kind of nice.

“You know,” she said magnanimously, buzzed on a potent mix of self-righteousness and a post-workout haze of endorphins, “this wasn’t that bad.” Mindy was exactly like the celebs in the magazines that said they ate guilty pleasure foods like a tablespoon of peanut butter every once in a while and ran every morning, because they just loved running _so much _, you know? She was definitely living up to the promise of her pink Lululemon yoga pants.__

Next to her Danny’s breath was evening out, like he was going to fall asleep in the middle of New York City, on the ground, like a homeless person or something.

She flicked his upper arm. “Wake up, dude.”

He opened a single judgmental eye in her direction. “I wasn’t falling asleep.”

“You know I can see you, right?”

He stifled a yawn in the crook of his elbow. His exercise t-shirt was stretched taut across his flat stomach, and she could see his chest rise and fall as he lay in the grass next to her. “I was just up late last night studying.”

“SATs?”

He nodded. “Practice tests.”

“You nervous?”

“Yeah,” he said quietly, and Mindy was surprised Danny would ever admit something like that. He looked miserable just saying the word.

“Me too. I mean, I know I’m going to crush it or whatever, but still.”

Danny picked at a blade of grass by his hip, crushing it until it left a stain on his fingers. “I just keep thinking, what if I’m not as smart as I think I am? Like, what if all I’m actually meant to do in life is work 9-5 at Mr. Salvatore’s.”

“If the pastrami fits…”

“Ha ha,” he said. “Very funny.”

“Hey, let me finish. I was going to say, if the pastrami fits, wear it. Dan, the meat man.” She waved a hand in front of both of them.

“What?”

“Oh, like you wouldn’t own it, strutting down the runway in your little pastrami suit.”

Danny was starting to grin despite himself, that half-pleased look he got on his face when he was fighting to be all solemn and gloomy and Catholic in the face of serious awesome. “What’s my tie made out of, sausage links?”

“Why not.”

“Does that mean my underwear’s edible too?”

Mindy smacked the side of his arm. “Gross, Castellano. Don’t be a pervert in a meat suit.”

“They don’t call me the meat man for no reason, am I right?”

“Oh my god,” she said, and throw her forearm over her eyes.

“I said,” Danny repeated, a little louder, “they don’t call me the _meat_ man for…”

“I got it, you weirdo.”

“Just checking,” Danny said, still grinning.

“You know you’re going to nail it though, right?” Mindy said. “For real. You’re one of the smartest people I know, Danny. You’ve got this in the bag.”

Danny stared at his hands for a long couple seconds, not saying anything, before dragging her up again and making her run around on block one more time, the jerk.

* * *

Mindy pulled on her luckiest pair of tights, her cutest pleated skirt, and her silver M necklace, preparing to go into battle. Mindy did one last run through from her thick stack of vocab flashcards and pumped herself up with the running playlist she’d put together for her torture sessions (okay, session, singular) with Danny. Rishi gave her a crayon drawing of what looked like a giant bird’s nest of colors that was supposed to be a picture of Mindy, and she could even sort of see it - there was a brown swirly bit at the top for her hair and face, while her clothes were a tasteful combo of pink and green lines so thick the crayon was flaking off the paper. She tucked the picture in her bookbag for good luck.

She waved at Maggie and Betsy on the other side of the gym, and spotted Danny, muttering to himself and pacing by the bleachers.

“You ready to crush this thing?” Peter asked her, and didn’t even wait for a response, just went in for the chest bump, almost knocking her over. She scowled at him, rubbing her boobs resentfully.

“I am certainly prepared to crush this exam,” Jeremy responded, his accent even more posh-Colin Firth than normal, a sure sign of nervousness.

“ _Take your seats_!” Morgan yelled at the far end of the gym, holding up a thick pile of papers which must be their SAT booklets. “Anybody not in their seats in the next two minutes will be _kicked out_ , do I make myself clear?”

“Why is _Morgan_ proctoring this?” Mindy asked as she moved forward to the desks set up in rows down the length of the basketball court.

“Subbing for Mr. Woodson,” Jeremy whispered back.

Mindy’s phone chimed. She pulled it out and read a single _good luck_ text from Danny. She looked up and caught his eye on the other side of the room. He nodded at her, pale but determined. She typed _u 2, danny_ , hit send, and shut off her phone.

* * *

While Mindy was riding the double-high of feeling like she’d aced the SATs _and_ knocked out a brutal quiz from their calc teacher with all the ease and grace of Beyoncé fielding a world tour and also, like, popping out the cutest baby imaginable between songs, Cliff broke up with her via letter.

The stationery was posh, thick like poster board, and Cliff called her by her first and last names at various points in the three paragraph letter (well-structured; his AP English teacher must be so proud) and Mindy couldn’t decide if it was either the classiest or most infuriating way she’d had ever been dumped. She picked at the corner of the letter, sitting on her bed and re-reading it for the nth time (because he’d _mailed_ it, seriously, was this like the pre-00s version of getting ditched via text?).

She checked the stamp on the envelope and saw that Cliff had mailed it two days before, on Wednesday, which explained why he’d turned tail and ran away from her when she saw him walking out of the boys' locker room for gym after third period yesterday. What a prince.

She texted Danny to bitch about it and ask for his opinion on the awfulness of the dumping method, and then Peter to ask if he wanted to go out clubbing so she could work this thing out of her system like the dancing queen that she was.

“Hells yes!” Peter exclaimed, calling her back, and they made plans to meet in front of her building in a half-hour. Mindy changed into a tight black sleeveless dress and pulled on an old hoodie with the East Park logo on the front and Danny’s JV baseball name and number on the back. She stuck a pair of low heels in her purse, pulled on her tennis shoes, and told her parents she was going over to Tamra’s for the evening.

She swapped shoes sitting on the stoop of her apartment building and chatted with Charlie, who was on his way to work the night shift after getting his beat switched up temporarily. Charlie asked about her classes and how senior year was going, and Mindy caught him up on the highlights, including dumb Cliff who she was going to dance out of her life like a vengeful pop goddess.

“Be safe, kid,” he said, and winked at her before waving goodbye.

Peter walked up in a collared blue shirt a couple minutes later, Danny behind him in what she thought of as the Castellano dirty dancing uniform, dark jeans that clung to his legs and a plain white button down, like a small town minister who was about to get down and hot all over the dance floor. Danny’s eyes flickered over Mindy, looking at her kind of strange, and she remembered suddenly that she was wearing his old freshman JV hoodie, the name CASTELLANO plastered all over her back in peeling black letters, because he’d dumped a couple of his old sweatshirts on her after his crazy growth-spurt last year. She didn’t really wear the ugly old thing outside the house much, so it wasn’t like he ever really saw her in it.

“Hope you don’t mind that I invited this loser along,” Peter said, pointing to Danny with his thumb. 

“You called me, man,” Danny said, shifting his gaze from Mindy to scowl fussily at Peter.

“Yeah, because I know how much you love dancing, dude,” Peter said, in that mix of straightforward and earnest that Mindy loved so much about him. “I also invited Jeremy. He’s been a total buzzkill lately. We need to get both of you,” Peter pointed to Mindy and vaguely around the three of them, like Jeremy was just going to teleport into their conversation from any direction, “some _action_ , son.”

“Gross,” she said.

“I speak the hard truths,” Peter said unapologetically.

“Sorry about Cliff, by the way,” Danny said, watching her again. “Him dumping you that way was a dick move.”

It was weird - she’d only dated Cliff for a couple months, but she thought that right now she was more hurt by the fact that he hadn’t even the decency to dump her face-to-face, like her normal cadre of terrible ex-boyfriends.

“Where’s Jeremy?” she asked instead.

“Meeting us there. C’mon, M, your feet all dolled up yet?”

She threw her sneakers in her bag and stripped the sweatshirt up over her head.

*

She danced with Peter for a couple songs and started to wonder if maybe he’d be into making out with her for a while, in one of the booths in the back of the club. The whole sucking face thing had turned out pretty great the one time they’d sort-of tried it last year after prom, and they _were_ bros, after all. It made sense, right? Bros helping bros get over breakups by, like, giving and getting each other some. It would definitely show she was over Cliff if she made out with Peter.

But Peter had his eye on this girl who looked way too old for him instead, like too-old-even-for-college old with pale blue eyeshadow and droopy boobs like she wasn’t even wearing a bra underneath her tank top. Peter did some sort of complicated sign language in Mindy’s direction while they were dancing that she eventually figured out meant that he wanted her to wingman for him. Gross.

“She’s a total skank,” she shouted at Peter over the music.

“I know, right?” he shouted back at her gleefully, looking proud of her for getting what he was going for.

“Get Jeremy to help you,” she yelled back, and shoved Peter at Jeremy, who was dorking it out hardcore with his hands in the air next to them and screaming that he loved Taylor bloody Swift.

Peter and Jeremy headed off to do whatever-the-hell they were going to try, so Mindy looked around the floor for Danny again. She spotted him dancing his sweet little moves by himself on the other side of the room, so she made her way over to him as a rap song with a heavy, stuttering beat started up. Danny pivoted when he saw her, grinning a little in greeting, his hips slim and fine in his tight jeans. He was sweating a little under the lights, but somehow that only made him look better, sort of weirdly grown up.

She remembered how shrimpy he’d been when they’d first met - bony shoulders and hair that wouldn’t stay gelled and a Staten accent that he’d tried so hard to mask - and it was suddenly surreal to her that that awkward kid and this guy she was dancing with were somehow the same person. Had she changed the same way? She wondered what Danny saw when he looked at her, if he remembered the girl she’d been in middle school at all, when she’d still worn braces and hadn’t even gotten contacts yet.

The beat downshifted a couple minutes later into a low, sultry number with crazy bass. Danny reached out for her hip, pulling her closer to him. Mindy was starting to get that good high she got while dancing, when her entire body was doing exactly what it was meant to be doing. The music was so loud in her skull it wiped out all of her thoughts, leaving her a blank slate in a physical body, pulsing in synchronized motion with a whole crowd of other people to the same beat.

Danny was starting to dance really close up on her, hand still ghosting over her hip, and Mindy was into it, she wasn’t going to lie, she was _super_ into it.

Danny fingers were grazing her waist, his skinny legs between her own. It was like everything he did made her look hotter and like a better dancer than she actually was. Danny hooked a finger in the loop at the side of her dress, pulling her closer and grinding up against her hips, their bodies moving together, and seriously, she could not understand how dorky Danny could be this hot when dancing. It boggled the mind.

She danced until she couldn’t remember that she hadn’t ever done anything else, and it was awesome, it was the best time Mindy had ever had dancing. She went to bed that night with the beat still thumping in her chest.

* * *

“Isn’t tonight the school homecoming game, thangam?” Mom asked, helping Rishi up onto his booster seat. “Aren’t you going this year?”

Mindy wrinkled her nose. “What, the football game? No way. If I wanted to see a bunch of preppy dudes chasing a ball around an open field that shouldn’t even exist in the middle of New York City, I’d take a bunch of stock brokers to Central Park and throw a rolled-up wad of cash in the middle.”

“Don’t you normally go, though?” Dad was setting the table, putting out plates and a thick stack of chapatis. “And I haven’t heard you talking about the dance tomorrow either.”

She hadn’t told her parents about Cliff, so she couldn’t really explain why she didn’t have a date since the guy she’d been planning to go with had unceremoniously dumped right before Homecoming for no good reason. “I just didn’t want to go this year, that’s all.”

“Well, if you’re free tomorrow, I could use some help getting ready for Diwali this year instead,” Mom said. “And we could go shopping for a new sari for you.”

Mindy would rather raid H&M any day of the week than buy a new sari, but whatever, it was her last year at home - and besides, she’d probably look banging if she wasn’t wearing the same pink sari she’d had since freshman year. She nodded, and scooted her chair a little closer to Rishi’s, grateful when Dad started talking about the new project his company had just won the contract for at work.

* * *

_Hamlet_ was a total bore. The guy was negging his girlfriend and bitching about his mom remarrying, and that kind of whining just wasn’t hot when all you had was a lineup of old dudes playing you in the movies. Like, slow your roll, Hamlet. Why did it have to be _Hamlet_ that was a high school rite of passage? Mindy would have been down for some R+J or the Shakespearean romcoms, even the one where the whole moral was about subjugating women or whatever - even that would have been better than Hamlet whining about his emo daddy issues.

“Get thee to a nunnery,” Jeremy said portentously, over-pronouncing the words like the second coming of the entire British stage actors guild.

“Hamlet’s a dick,” Mindy said, waving one of the parmesan french fries she’d scored from a food truck just outside the school for lunch. “Hamlet is, like, a whole bag full of dicks. You just like the play because Ms. Wu keeps asking you to read out loud in class.”

Jeremy sniffed, adjusting the actual, real-life sweater vest he was wearing. “Can I help it if Ms. Wu has a keen eye for talent?”

“Two words, man: English accent,” Peter said. “And you know it.”

Danny scowled at his copy of _The Scarlet Letter_ next to Peter, ignoring all of them, turning pages between bites of the ham and cheese sandwich he’d brown bagged in for lunch. Mindy had suffered through some serious Hester Prynne her junior year when she’d taken American Lit, so she had sympathy for the guy. Not even the existence of a movie like _Easy A_ and knowing that all that good old Hester had wanted to do was exercise her god-given right to hook ups made that book easier to swallow.

The bell rang a couple minutes later, and Mindy ditched her uneaten fries and was on her way to European History when Danny caught up with her again in the hallway outside her locker.

“Hey, Min,” he said, leaning against the locker next to hers. “You doing anything on Saturday?”

“Betsy and I were talking about hitting up some thrift stores, but we’ll probably end up doing that next weekend instead, so I guess not much. Why?”

Danny shrugged, and it couldn’t have been more obvious he was hiding something than if he’d just plastered a giant sign to his forehead that said I AM NOT TELLING THE WHOLE TRUTH. “No reason.”

Mindy narrowed her eyes.

“I just wanted to know if you wanted to hang out for a while. It’s not a big deal.”

“I mean, I guess I’m free, depending on what Betsy wants to do. Text me?”

“Awesome,” Danny said, and took off down the hallway. God, he was such a weirdo sometimes.

* * *

Mindy didn’t figure out what was up until she ended up standing in front of the Whitehall Ferry Terminal with Danny on Saturday morning.

“Oh my god,” she said, “are you trying to kidnap me or something?” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Danny, are you trying to sell me into white slavery?”

“What? No. No! I mean, you’re not even white.”

“So the slavery part is legit, but the white part isn’t?” She squinted at the building. “Isn’t this where the Staten Island Ferry leaves from?”

He shifted, trying to look all casual, his ears looking more like goofy stick-out Dumbo ears with his hair slicked back flat. He shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his varsity jacket. “Yeah. You, uh, ever been to Staten?”

“As in, _Staten Island_ Staten?”

Danny rolled his eyes.

“Um, no?”

“Well, c’mon then.”

*

“Where are we going again? And why aren’t we there yet?” Mindy complained, alternating between glaring resentfully at her feet and Danny next to her. If she’d known she was about to walk the entire length of the island a couple times over she’d have grabbed her running shoes this morning instead of the adorable kitten heels she was currently tottering around in. “And haven’t I seen that house before? Danny, are you walking me around in _circles_?” There couldn’t be that many buildings painted pink in Staten, right?

“Almost there,” Danny answered shortly, which answered none of her questions. _Almost there_ had been Danny’s mantra for the past, like, three marathons they’d walked.

“Is this some sort of stealth make-up workout/punishment because I didn’t go running with you last weekend? I told you, I had just gotten a pedicure the day before. I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to run for, like, a week after you get a pedicure or you can mess up the—”

“I told you, we’re almost there,” he repeated, and Mindy tried not to scream.

Their destination, when Danny _finally_ said they’d made it, turned out to be the apartment building where his Dad lived.

“You lived here?” Mindy asked, eyeing the building and the neighborhood around it. It was pretty dismal, the sort of place you filmed tear-jerker documentaries about inner-city kids being crushed by the system or whatever.

“I haven’t for a long time,” Danny said, staring at the apartment building door with weirdly pumped-up determination, like he was going to have to wrestle some muscle-bound Staten Island bouncer to gain entrance. Mindy didn’t really get what that look was about until she met Danny’s dad and Danny made it about three tense sentences into asking for help with college tuition when the yelling started.

Mindy excused herself into the tiny kitchen as politely as she could and lurked behind the paper-thin walls, feeling super awkward and awful and wondering why, exactly, Danny had invited her along. Like, she got that she was probably emotional support or whatever, but really, Danny had needed BFF backup to get in an argument about money with his dad? Dude’s family was messed up, way more than she might have guessed.

Mindy was deep into destroying a game of Candy Crush and humming the Red album loudly to herself when Danny stomped into the kitchen. He grabbed her free hand and pulled her along silently, springing her from her self-imposed kitchen exile, thank _god_.

Mindy waved limply to Danny’s dad as they exited the apartment, Danny still clutching her other hand.

*

The evening had sunk into deep twilight by the time they navigated the bus lines to get them back to the ferry. They swiped their Metrocards to board, and Mindy frowned at Danny’s aggressively silent back. This day had been a major bust, in more ways than one.

The ferry rocked hard once, then back and forth gently as it pulled away from the pier. The engine seemed louder than it had been earlier, echoing across the deep water. Danny leaned his forearms against the metal railing painted orange next to her. She could see the outline of his profile limned in the dim light streaming out from the interior cabin of the ferry.

She thought of about a dozen openings to try to talk to Danny about the whole majorly tragic and depressing dad situation he had going on and chickened out on each one. She’d resigned herself to awkward silence for the rest of both of their natural-born lives when Danny finally spoke.

“Thanks for coming out here with me.”

Right. “You know, you could have just told me what you were thinking of doing from the beginning.”

“I know. I just… I wasn’t sure I’d actually be able to do it. Talk to him, I mean.” He settled further into the persona of darkly-brooding-tiny-fit-man he was working hard on perfecting and sighed. “I didn’t want you to know if I was too much of a coward to talk to my own dad.”

Oh. She couldn’t imagine ever being too scared to talk to somebody in her own family - no matter what, she always knew Mom and Dad and Rishi would have her back. She tried to imagine life without one of them, and the thought was a gaping black hole in her chest, huge and unfathomable.

“What would we have done if you couldn’t do it?” she asked instead.

He shrugged. “I guess I was thinking maybe I’d show you my old neighborhood or something.” He hesitated, and then turned to her as if struck by a thought for the first time. “What did _you_ think we were doing, anyway?”

 _I thought this might be a date._ The words were on the tip of her tongue. She swallowed them back, shocked. Oh god! Danny was, like, her best friend. Thinking that today might have been a date was as weird as if she’d suddenly turned lesbo overnight and wanted to make out all the time with Tamra or something.

She punched him on the shoulder instead, borrowing a move from Peter’s bro book of friendship. No weirdness here!

“I don’t know,” she said, dimly aware that her voice was way too high. “Ha ha ha.”

Danny rubbed his shoulder and looked at her kind of strange. “Right,” he agreed finally.

And that’s when everything went dark.

Well, not _everything_.

The lights from the city in front of them were still there, and the haze of light pollution made the sky above them gleam dimly even in the dark. But the light streaming out from the interior cabin of the ferry went black and the engine working away underneath their feet sputtered loudly and died with a high-pitched whine.

Mindy grabbed onto the rail. “Oh my god.”

Danny didn’t say anything next to her, but she heard his sharp inhalation of breath, strangely loud in the stillness.

Without the ferry engine running she could hear the distant rumble and noise of the city across the water, a few sharp taxi horns floating up above the din of the New York skyline. Voices raised behind them on the ferry, some sounding sharp and questioning, a busy mumble of sudden activity.

Mindy turned toward Danny. “Danny, I don’t know if….”

He kissed her.

Danny’s lips were closed; he was pressing them up against her own lips firmly. It was nothing like the last time they’d kissed, the only time they’d kissed, which had been sloppy and drunk and wrong. But this kiss - this kiss was dry and hard. It lasted only a second or two before Danny pulled back.

Dany was breathing hard, harder than he did even after after hustling at baseball practice. She could feel his breath on her cheek.

It was dark, the sounds of sloshing water echoing around them. Mindy licked her lips, watching Danny closely. She nodded.

Danny slammed back into her like she’d just shot the starting pistol at a race, and the finish line was _her_. His mouth was all overs hers. His hands started at her waist and drifted south quickly, ghosting over her hips like he had when they were dancing, and she realized with a dizzy, reeling feeling that he was tracing the line of her body downward. She felt his hands settle at the curve of her ass, his fingertips flexing. She put her hand up to the line of his jaw and tilted her mouth to get better access to his.

Danny broke away from her when the lights of the ferry flickered back on. He was almost panting. He caught her eye in the sudden light. A shy, almost boyish grin crept across his face.

Like Mindy could let something like that stand. She grabbed his ears and dragged his dumb, awesome face down to hers again.

They kissed, breathless, until the engine started back up again underneath their feet. Mindy held Danny’s hand as they disembarked, and she missed three separate trains home while making out with Danny like a crazy woman by the Bowling Green stop, unable to get enough of his lips on hers. When she finally let go, she was only halfway down the stairs when her phone beeped, and she swiped open to a close-up photo of Danny grinning like a fool into his camera, her tinted gloss still visible on his lips.

* * *

Mindy sat in Mrs. Gibson’s class Monday morning with the knowledge that she’d kissed Danny lodged warmly in her chest, like a physical thing she could take out and turn over, if she wanted to. Nobody else knew. It was a secret. It was…

“So you and Danny, huh?” Peter asked, throwing his bag down on the desk in front of hers.

“What,” Mindy said flatly.

“Danny told me you’re doing that leaf-pigmentation project for bio together. I mean, damn, girl. You could have at least thought to ask me.”

“Oh.” She laughed brilliantly, like the crazy good actress she was. “ _That_.”

*

Danny was in his normal seat already by the time she made it to calc for second period. His eyes swung to hers as soon as she entered the room, and an ocean of static engulfed her when their eyes met, muting everything else. They’d been texting all weekend, but they hadn’t seen each other again since they’d ended up making out over, like, half the boroughs of New York.

Mindy sat down behind Danny like she always did.

He nodded a terse greeting to her, just like he always did.

She could feel the tension vibrating between them, just _sitting_ there, staring at the back of Danny’s head. At the curve of the back of his ears, sticking out like the handles of Mom’s teapot. At the straight line of cut hair at the base of his skull, where somebody (his mom? a barber?) had shaved a neat line, although she could see the prickle of dark stubble a bit further down, the hair already growing back. At the shifting of the henley he wore across his compact but still surprisingly solid shoulders, a relic of years of baseball and physical work during his summer jobs.

Who knew making out with Danny one time would make him so irresistible? She’d been sitting behind him in class for years, and she’d never felt anything like this before, not even when Danny had spent the summer before their junior year bean-sprouting his way up to almost-hottie status. She wanted to touch the back of his neck _so bad_.

The bell rang approximately a thousand years of torture later, during which she learned maybe 0.2% of what she was supposed to about differentials, and Mindy grabbed Danny’s hand and hustled him out of the classroom. Maybe she could jump him in the back of the library, if one of the group study rooms or stacks was empty? Definitely the library. She took a left at the next hallway, dragging Danny along in her wake.

“Mindy, what are you-”

“Almost there,” she said, mimicking the tone he’d used when he dragged her all over Staten Island that weekend.

Mindy powered through the double doors to the school library. The study rooms on the left side were all occupied, so she took a hard turn into the nonfiction section, with its dewey decimal numbers and boring-ass subjects. The 300s were clear. She pulled Danny into the aisle with her, dropped his hand, and threw her own arms back dramatically.

“Do me,” she said, and puckered up her lips.

“What?”

“Take me now, Danny.”

Danny gave a wild look around. “You want me to have sex with you? _Here_?”

“What? No! Oh my god. _Kiss me_ , you idi-“

Mindy was still unprepared for when he did kiss her, because one second Danny was standing awkwardly in front of her, eyes wide, and then next thing she knew she was being kissed like crazy. It was _awesome_. His hands were twisted up in her hair. She wound her arms around his tight little torso.

“I almost tried to kiss you in the middle of calc class,” she panted, when she could tear her lips away for a second. “I never knew the back of somebody’s head could be so sexual, Danny.”

The warning bell for the next class rang, distantly.

“Shit,” Danny muttered, and kissed her again, hard.

“We have to-“ He slid his tongue against hers and she lost track of herself for a moment. “…go to class.”

“Do we?” he asked, and slid his fingers underneath the hem of her shirt, tracing a line of bare skin. Mindy almost swooned.

“...No?” she said.

Danny thunked his forehead down on her shoulder. He stayed there for a moment before lifting his head again, looking at her sheepishly. “You go first then,” he said. “I gotta… you know.”

Mindy squinted her eyes at him.

“Uh,” he said, looking a little embarrassed now, and tilted his head downwards.

“Oh,” she said, feeling her face go hot. “Right.”

She kissed him once more, chastely, because Mindy Lahiri was nothing if not hella respectful of awkward times to get an erection, and slipped out of the stacks. She looked back one last time to see Danny leaning his head forward against a bookshelf, eyes closed and breathing hard.

* * *

“Hey.” Danny leaned close next to her to whisper the words in her ear, and the feeling of his voice, so low and warm and close, made her shiver. “You free after school today?”

It was probably illegal to feel this good waiting in the line for school lunch. Mindy felt a weird rush, jumbled up in her stomach, of giddiness and the overwhelming and conflicting urge to kiss Danny hard on the mouth - but also to never in her life to make out with a guy with the sharp, judgmental eyes of Beverly watching her. Also, hunger. She was pretty sure being hungry was mixed up in there somehow. What, like she wasn’t a growing girl with a healthy appetite.

It was a close call, but Beverly was serving up steamed broccoli that smelled like the rank side street next to her apartment building, so discretion won. For now.

“For a while,” she whispered back. “I’ve got to watch Rishi at 5 - my mom’s got this evening work thing at the gallery, and after that I promised Betsy I’d work with her on the poetry readings we have to do for Brit Lit next week. But before that… I’m all yours.”

“Good,” he murmured in her hair, and Mindy had never been so thankful that you couldn’t really tell when she blushed.

*

Mindy could not understand how she’d ever lived her life before making out with Danny Castellano. She was pretty sure every breath she’d drawn before kissing Danny had been a waste of time, dozens of opportunities for prime makeouts flushed down the toilet of life. Why hadn’t she been macking on Danny constantly since, like, middle school? Sure, he’d been a skinny little dweeb back then, fighting her for the top spot in the class rankings and getting under her skin with his mouthy attitude and the chip on his shoulder, but still, if she could travel back in time, she’d definitely tell her seventh grade counterpart to a) ditch the glasses already and b) kiss that short annoying white boy in your class on the mouth, because it was going to be majorly worth it.

“Earth to Mindy,” Peter said, and waved a pair of safety goggles in front of her face. “Come in, Lahiri.”

She was going to get nailed for her secret affair before it stopped being hot if she couldn’t keep her eyes off Danny’s tight little butt in those blue jeans. She snatched the safety goggles out of Peter’s hand and focused up, pulling both the goggles and her game face on.

An hour later, they’d solidified boiled agar into blocks they molded using ice cube trays, which they would use for their final lab in a couple weeks, and they were cleaning up their station when Mindy realized that Danny had snuck out of class already. He’d been waiting for her in lab the last couple of weeks, and it was super sweet, how Danny tried to spend as much time as possible with her. Mindy tried to escape as well, wondering if she could still catch up with him, but Peter caught her at the doorway and Jeremy made her wash the Erlenmeyer flasks they’d used for the agar, frowning at her like some sort of sweater-wearing English nanny the entire time.

She was thinking idly about grabbing lunch before getting sucked into the horrors of Europe circa the Black Death and almost definitely losing her appetite, when she rounded the corner of the school building, walking out past the metal bleachers of the sports field, and ran smack into Danny there.

Smoking.

Danny. Smoking. Danny _smoking_. W. T. _F_.

Danny dropped the cigarette like a hot potato and ground it out underneath his sneaker.

She found her voice. “You _smoke_?”

“Never!” Danny snapped, the denial automatic, then seemed to reconsider the evidence.

This was _crazy_. Danny smoked! How had she never known this? “Your mom lets you _smoke_?”

“No!” He looked straight-up embarrassed now. “Of course she doesn’t know. She’d kill me.”

Mindy hoisted herself up on the metal bleachers. Danny slouched in the shadow of the risers like some sexy, bad boy teenager out of an educational program about the triple dangers of high school: smoking, drinking, and teen pregnancy.

“You’re not going to tell her, are you?”

“Do I look like a narc, Danny?”

“Right.”

Mindy drummed her fingers on the bleacher.

“What?”

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, Danny!”

“About smoking?”

“Yes, about smoking, you dummy! I’m your girlfriend. I’m supposed to bum cigarettes off of you and then we both lean against brick walls and I look like Kristen Stewart when we smoke. We would look so hot together.”

“You want to…”

“Eew, gross, no. If I wanted to smoke I would lick an ashtray and then inject cancer straight into my lungs. But you could have _offered_.”

Danny leaned his shoulders back against the bleachers and looked her over. “Um, okay. You want one, then?”

“Sure,” she said, and he shook his pack out, handing her a cigarette. Mindy flipped it a couple times in her fingers and then put it behind her ear, beaming up at Danny. “You know, I always wondered why you tasted so minty fresh sometimes. I always thought you were just really into dental hygiene.”

“I’m trying to quit,” Danny said, frowning down at the pack in his hands, looking serious all of a sudden.

“You should,” she said. “I mean, you’re a future doctor, Danny.”

“Right,” he muttered.

She kicked her heels against the metal bleachers. The football team had finished their last game for the season last weekend, so the field was in the process of being torn up in preparation for spring sports after winter break, the dying brown grass marked up with a random-looking hodgepodge of a faint baseball diamond, soccer lines, and football hash marks.

Danny looked over at her then, a funny little squint in his eyes. “So you’re my girlfriend now?”

Oops. She hadn’t realized until just now that neither of them had ever said that out loud, even though Mindy had been thinking of Danny as her boyfriend for the last couple weeks, at least.

She lifted her chin up, deciding to brazen it out. “Only if you want to call the awesome girl you make out with all the time and are best friends with your girlfriend, I guess.”

Danny glanced around them at the deserted field, then, seeing nobody else was around, stepped in close to her, crowding her, his hands on her waist, and oh yeah, that was more like it. “I guess we can do that,” he said, and rubbed a thumb against her hip. “I’d like that.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her gently. Mindy’s heart was singing. Danny was hers, and she was his, and the fact that it was something only the two of them knew made everything so much more romantic, even if he was a smoker. They were like Romeo and Juliet, like the Leonardo DiCaprio version, minus the whole skeezy teenage marriage thing and dramatic double-suicide, for sure.

* * *

She wasn't gonna do it every day or anything, but it _did_ make it easier to keep her hands off Danny when he wasn't sitting right next to her at lunch, his thigh a warm weight against her own. Hopefully no one could tell why she'd sexiled herself, but there didn't seem to be a lot that got past Peter.

Mindy tuned back into whatever it was that Tamra and Betsy were saying. Something about essays, maybe? Oh, they were talking about what schools they were applying to _again_ , or at least Betsy was. Tamra looked like she couldn't have cared less. "It's got to be a place where you'll fit in," Betsy was saying eagerly.

Mindy poked at her tapioca pudding and considered. Well, Ivy, duh - she hadn't been working her butt off for a mediocre class ranking. But maybe she wasn't dying to be surrounded by the nerds of America.

She was still thinking about it as she headed home with Danny after school.

"So, I was thinking," she said when they were finally alone - well, not really alone but Danny was the only person she recognized in the throng on the subway platform - "we haven't had the talk."

He was so easy. She watched his eyes bug out a little. "The _college_ talk, you perv." She said the last bit up against his mouth just because she could.

"Hey, whoa," he said, because he couldn't let himself have fun for even a split second.

"Anyway," she said, stepping back and smoothing down her skirt, "my dad took me to visit some schools over the summer, and I've been reading up on them, and I think I have it narrowed down."

Why Danny was pulling the cranky old man face was beyond her. "To what?"

"What's with the face?"

"Nothing. I guess I should have done some visiting too, but I was taking all the hours Mr. S could give me down at the deli."

"That's why you have a super-awesome girlfriend, dummy. To share her wealth of experience. Like, did you know the admissions office at Brown has the coolest toilet ever? It’s, like, a huge slab of wood with a little hole cut out."

"That sounds gross."

"Okay, fine, but it was all old-timey and colonial, and it was cool to sit there. Like _George Washington peed here._ "

"I hope he wasn't sitting when he peed."

"Shut up," she said, but couldn't help laughing. "Dartmouth has a lab where you can make your own jewelry."

"Just what I always wanted," Danny said, rolling his eyes. "Hey, I bet Peter'll be thrilled."

"I liked Yale - there was this one place we got pizza, and it was _so_ good, like, make Italian men cry for their moms." She smacked a kiss against her fingertips.

"You're such a nutjob. I bet that wasn't authentic at all. How many Italians got lost on the way to New York and ended up in Connecticut?" He sounded so dismissive, like the entire state of Connecticut was 100% WASPs by law.

“So,” Mindy said, sneaking her hand into Danny’s, “what are you thinking of for the Winter Formal this year?”

Danny’s fingers tightened in her grip. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, actually. Money’s kinda tight right now, and I don’t think I know if I can afford it.”

“Oh,” she said, trying not to show her disappointment. “I mean, that’s okay. Who needs some dumb school dance? We’re doing this thing on the DL, so it isn’t like going to the dance together makes sense anyway.”

“Right,” Danny muttered, sort of under his voice and angry, like he hadn’t actually meant for her to hear. Mindy frowned, but before she could ask him about it, the 6 train came roaring onto the track, and then she had to concentrate to squeeze into the three square inches between Danny and the door.

* * *

Mindy set up shop in Gregory's Coffee with a stack of college applications, a copy of the latest issue of _Cosmo_ , and a large gingerbread latte, and wrote application essays until her fingers ached. She was rewarding herself with an intense quiz titled But Seriously, How Into You Is He _Really_? (spoiler: Danny was _super_ into her, if she ignored all the questions about whether anybody else knew about their relationship) when Peter texted her about grabbing some pizza for lunch - East Park High had made it into the playoffs for soccer again, and Jeremy had been going on and on about it all week, so Mindy was pretty sure this was nothing but an excuse to carb-load before Jeremy’s match tomorrow. But Mindy decided she deserved a night out after a Saturday morning slamming the college-application process into the ground. Besides, she probably needed to carb-load herself just to keep up with, you know, _life_.

Tamra was standing outside with Peter and Jeremy when Mindy arrived at the buck-a-slice place around the corner from Gregory's, all of them stomping their feet in the cold air and blowing in their hands. They walked in together, and Morgan turned around behind the counter, yelling a vague greeting before he saw who it was. He was wearing a white apron and one of those tall white chef hats, like the mouse in _Ratatouille_ , and there was pizza sauce streaked across his left check.

“Morgan?” Peter asked, elbowing his way past Jeremy. “I didn’t know you worked here, man.”

Morgan ignored him, sweeping a low, formal bow in Tamra’s direction. “My lady.”

“You look like Chef Boyardee,” Tamra said, frowning in mild confusion.

Morgan adjusted the hat on his head, shifting it like the wobbly top of a souffle. “It’s a weekend gig,” he explained, answering Peter’s original question. “Keeps me off the streets. NO MORE STEALING CARS, that’s what my probation officer always says.”

“I’m sure we all have a million things we’d love to catch up on,” Jeremy said, in the prissy way he had, “but some of us have important matches of footy tomorrow. Can we order?”

“Dude, you did _not_ just call soccer _footy_.”

They ordered slices, and Morgan presented Tamra her plate “on the house”, which everybody except Tamra knew was code for I-have-a-majorly-embarrassing-crush-on-you. They ate, talking about college applications (Peter’s part of that conversation consisted of two words: _Dartmouth, yo_ ) and Jeremy’s match the next day, before Mindy and the guys waved goodbye to Tamra at the corner. As soon as Tamra was out of sight Peter turned around to face her and Jeremy, shaking his head.

“That boy Morgan is so whipped, and he ain’t gettin’ _any_.”

* * *

Dad rented skates for all three of them. Her parents had been making an embarrassing fuss about this being her last winter at home, like she was being shipped off to another planet next year instead of just going to college. It wasn’t like she hadn’t spent months away from home and halfway across the actual world for practically every summer she could remember - but this was the big one, the Mindy-leaves-home-for-good one, she guessed, so it wasn’t like she was going to complain when Dad wanted to go skating to celebrate the end of the semester, even if it was still a week before their traditional skating date on the day after Christmas.

Dad held both of Rishi’s hands, skating backwards as Rishi frowned in confusion at his feet on the ice, having forgotten everything they’d gone through last year trying to teach him how to glide on the ice. Mindy skated ahead and did a couple easy spins, then looped back around and took over Rishi-duty. Bryant Park was busy, packed full of skaters doing jumps in the middle of the rink and slower skaters inching their way around the outer lane, hanging onto the boards.

“You gotta move your feet a little, bud, you can’t just let me tow you the whole way around,” she said.

“Haaaard,” Rishi whined, and Mindy rolled her eyes.

“Well, duh, of course it’s hard. That’s what makes it so much fun when you get the hang of it.”

“Listen to your sister,” Dad said, and oh man, Mindy was going to miss _this_ \- being a font of big-sister wisdom for Rishi, getting to watch him grow up into this super cute kid. Dad skated by, and Mindy readjusted the scarf around her neck. Her phone buzzed in her back pocket, and she dropped one of Rishi’s hands to pull it out with a gloved hand. She read the text as Rishi bobbled uncertainly with the loss of one of his guiding hands: _Ma and Richie gone tomorrow night, u want to come over?_

She yanked her glove off with her teeth to swipe the lock screen, and texted back a one-handed _yes_ with an emoji of a clock and a single question mark, and smiled as she put her phone back in her pocket.

* * *

Danny’s apartment was small - at least half the size of where she lived, and it wasn’t exactly like her family had a huge place or anything. There was a miniature Christmas tree set up by the TV, draped with tinsel and bearing a couple of mismatched ornaments. Danny pulled her by the hand through the door of his bedroom, but Mindy caught a glimpse of a refrigerator papered with elementary-school artwork and a crocheted afghan thrown over the back of a battered sofa before Danny shut the door.

Most of the space in his bedroom was taken up by Danny’s twin bed in the corner, but there was a small writing desk crowded against the wall piled high with textbooks, and shelves above his headboard displaying a couple baseball trophies, from t-ball and little league on up. In the corner closest to the small closet at the foot of the bed was a pile of dirty laundry thrown on the floor.

That was all Mindy really had time to notice before Danny was kissing her, his hands on her waist. “Ma took Richie to see my dad and his new girlfriend for Christmas,” Danny explained against her mouth. “They’re going to be gone until late.”

She smiled, twisting her finger up in the soft fabric of the henley Danny was wearing. “Oh yeah?”

*

“So when did you know you might have a thing for me?” Mindy asked, lying on Danny’s bed and picking at a loose thread on his dark blue comforter, both of them catching their breath after making out like their lives depended on it. “I mean, not that I blame you, because I’m obviously super adorable, but I had no idea you even liked me.”

Danny lifted himself up on an elbow to look down at her. Danny’s room was dim behind him, lit only by a single string of red-and-blue Christmas lights blinking on the shelf above the headboard and the ever-present glow of the city streaming in through the single window, punctuated by the noise of taxi horns and people on the street. “Really? You had no idea?”

“Well… not really, no.” Mindy shifted - that wasn’t _quite_ true, but it was hard to explain why she felt that way.

“You know,” Danny said slowly, the blinking Christmas lights throwing strange shadows across his face, “I did kiss you sophomore year.”

Mindy’s jaw dropped. “No way. No _way_. You have not liked me since then! Oh my god, sophomore year? You said you were drunk! You said you kissed me because you got drunk for the first time, and you didn’t know what you were doing.” She smacked his side. “You are such a liar, Danny Castellano!”

Danny flopped back onto the bed next to her again, throwing a forearm over his eyes. “What was I supposed to do? You were dating Casey, Min. I thought you weren’t going to want to even be my friend after I woke up the next morning and remembered what I’d done. I mean, I kissed you while you were dating another guy. And then I threw up all over you.” Danny was talking fast now, the words spilling out of his mouth. “And it’s not like I’ve just been sitting in the corner all this time, pining away for you or anything. But you’re my best friend, and you… you’re, I don’t know. You’re really hot, okay? But I knew you didn’t think of me the same way, and I didn’t think you ever would, until we went dancing earlier this year.”

“Dancing?”

“You know, after Cliff broke up with you before Homecoming. And then I thought… I dunno. I thought, _maybe_.”

Mindy turned over onto her stomach, thinking it over, then tilted her head back up toward Danny, asking the one easy question in that whole crazy spew of Castellano-feelings. “You think I’m hot?”

Danny scooted down closer to her then, his voice lower, and it was crazy sexy all of a sudden, him whispering in her ear. “Mega-hot.”

Mindy bit her lip. 

Danny settled back away from her again, looking pleased with himself. “Also, you should know, I haven’t smoked in almost five days, since classes ended.”

Mindy crawled her fingers up Danny’s stomach, pushing fabric out of the way, and she could feel his skin, warm underneath her fingertips. “You trying to get in my pants, Castellano? Telling me you’ve had a huge crush on me all this time and that you’re quitting smoking, I mean, way to rev a girl’s engine.”

Danny didn’t laugh at her dumb joke. He frowned, instead, looking unexpectedly serious, like she’d been seriously propositioning him, which - okay, yes, she totally had been, but she didn’t want to just come out and _beg_ for it, right?

The Christmas lights blinked their shifting of shadows across Danny’s face, casting odd shades of red and blue. He took her hand in his and turned it over, tracing her life line with his thumbnail, and Mindy shivered. “I don’t…” Danny started to say, then stopped and shook his head. “I like you, Mindy,” he said, seriously. “I don’t want to… I want to wait. If that’s okay with you.”

“I slept with Casey,” she blurted out, and Danny froze. “Sorry, I know that sounds weird to just say it like that, but if you don’t want to sleep with me because you think I’m a virgin or whatever... I’m not.” She looked up at Danny, and saw him swallow. “And you told me you slept with Christina last year, when the two of you got back together, so it’s... we’re equal, you know? It doesn’t have to be a big deal.”

Danny was quiet for a while, looking down at the palm of her hand. “That’s not exactly it,” he said finally, his voice low. “It’s just… I shouldn’t have slept with Christina. It was a mistake. I regretted it, afterwards.”

“Oh,” Mindy said quietly.

“I hope that’s okay,” Danny said. “I mean - you said it doesn’t have to be a big deal. I _want_ it to be a big deal.”

“Oh,” Mindy said, in a different tone of voice.

Mindy shifted, so her arm snuck underneath Danny’s torso, and pulled, rolling his body partway on top of hers. Danny looked startled for a moment, his lips only an inch or two away from hers, and the air seemed quiet and heavy between them. “It’s okay with me,” she said solemnly, and Danny looked at her in an odd, unfathomable way for a moment, his eyes dark and strange, but then the moment passed and he leaned in to kiss her softly, Christmas lights blinking silently above them.


	6. Senior Year: Spring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And here we come to the end of Mindy's time in high school.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who's been cheering us along the way! I personally want to thank my astonishing co-author blithers for being everything that's great about fandom in one handy package and our magnificent beta ghostcat who paid us the tremendous honor of taking our story as seriously as she takes her own (which are fantastic - go read her stuff!).

So this was not exactly how she’d planned to rock up to East Park to kick off 2014. Of course she had huge cans and no need to stuff her bra, but keeping tissues there just made sense, since her bag was always stuffed so full that she’d have sneezed all over everything in the vicinity before she could get a Kleenex out of the depths of her bag. She was bleary-eyed, sure, but she could still brighten up when she saw her man.

Danny was walking in the same direction, about ten people ahead of her, so she dodged and weaved through the crowd - which, hello, she was a petite Asian woman, so she was _darting_ through, not _ramming through like a Mack truck_ like some rando complained - to get to his side. She wanted to wash her hands before holding his, because she’d been blowing her nose all morning, to the point where Mom even said she should think about staying home from school, so she just bumped his shoulder with hers. “Hey, Danny!” she said.

His eyes darted wildly around before settling on her. “Hey,” he said, quiet enough that she had to lean in to hear if his voice was still as scratchy as it’d sounded on the phone the other night.

That was it, no kiss, which might have been because her nose was red and raw, but still, he should have given her that _look_ , right, the one that made her think he wanted to push her up against her locker and make out with her until the cows came home?

He looked at her again, frowning a little. “What’s the matter? You sick?”

“I think I caught the bug you had over Christmas break,” she said, which sounded like a decent euphemism. She sneezed as the bell went off directly overhead, deafening her. “Ugh, why are we even back?” Good thing she'd already decided she didn't have the time to audition for the musical, because there was no way she was going to be phlegm-free by the end of the week.

Danny smiled then, a little thing that was there and gone in a flash, and got his hand on the small of her back. “Come on,” he said, “those British books aren’t gonna just read themselves.”

*

“Look, I know you want to stay healthy or whatever for baseball season, but I swear I’m not contagious at this point,” Mindy said finally, when Danny was sitting in the library with her, close enough for their elbows to touch but looking like all he had on his mind was calculus. _No one_ actually liked calc that much.

“Cut it out,” he said when she put her hand on his thigh. “Not here, not in public.”

“You don’t think it makes it hotter, being on school property, maybe getting caught?” she whispered. She definitely remembered getting all hot and bothered over by the 300s with Danny sucking on her tongue.

“No,” he said, but his voice quavered a little and she moved her hand a teensy bit higher. “No,” he repeated, pushing his chair back and standing up. “I gotta hit the head,” he said, and took off.

Well. That was weird. Two days ago he’d been kissing her like he couldn’t get enough of her, like his tongue was a miniature cartographer and her mouth was unmapped territory, and they’d been up against some building that was on one of his weird shortcuts home, out in public. So she’d thought maybe he had a thing about being in public, but most likely he didn’t if he could take an actual pee break when she was offering a makeout session in the library. Then again, the library was pretty deserted to count as public, so maybe that was his problem.

Whatever, she was in need of sustenance and all that she had in her change purse was like two sad dimes. Danny probably had change rattling around in his backpack. She pulled everything out in one neat stack - _god_ , he was anal-retentive - and felt around the gritty inside of his bag. Nada. She was stuffing his books and papers back into the bag when it clicked what she was holding. The papers weren’t homework; they were thick stationery with some very familiar embossed letterheads: Columbia, NYU, Hunter, Fordham. Wow. Danny wasn’t planning on moving at all, even if he had more reason than most people to want a fresh start.

She had everything back in his bag and even an answer for #7 by the time he came back.

* * *

“You sly dog,” Peter said in her ear when they went up to the front of the room to collect their safety gear.

“What?” she asked absently, looking for the safety goggles that had the elastic that wouldn’t get caught in her hair, then snagging three more pairs for the boys.

Peter had four safety aprons folded over his arm and he looked like a maître d’ at a really sketchy restaurant. “You and Danny. Knockin’ boots on the DL.”

“Uh, what?” she stalled, playing for time. She tried to catch Danny’s eye, but he was busy talking to Jeremy and getting their workstations set up for the lab. He was such a little old man. He was _her_ little old man. She gave into the curiosity that was eating her up. “What did he say?” she asked Peter.

“Nothin’, dude. Everyone else in the locker room is talking about chicks, and he’s not saying a word.”

“So how is that different from usual?” Danny hadn’t had a girlfriend since Christina, right?

“It’s not, but you’re not showing up to watch us practice, and you guys clearly haven’t had a fight, because you’re speaking to each other as far as I can see, and _oh my god_ , I was just messing around, but it’s real! I’m Sherlock Holmes! Jewlock!”

“Shut up!” she said, swatting ineffectually at him. She really needed to work on her poker face.

“You’re in the wrong class, girl, cause that is _chemistry_.”

“You are so terrible,” she said, but she was laughing, and that was all the encouragement a doofus like Peter needed. Danny and Jeremy both looked up at her, Danny smiling at her and Jeremy asking what the joke was.

She was totally, one-hundred percent into Danny Castellano. No joke.

*

Mindy lay on her stomach on her bed, face propped up with one hand while she turned the pages of _Jane Eyre_ with the other. For a weird old bat, Ms. Wu had pretty good taste in books - Mindy’d already read _Pride and Prejudice_ , tyvm, and going through the Sherlock Holmes stories had been a breeze, even if the bad guy never turned out to be the butler, which was disappointing. But _Jane Eyre_ started off with a little girl basically having the mother of all tantrums, and Mindy could get behind that. Jane’s aunt was a total bitch.

“Hi, kondai,” she heard, and there was Mom, standing in the doorway. “What are you reading?”

Mindy rolled over and held the book up. Mom nodded, then asked, “Is it for school?”

She wasn’t such a nerd that she’d read a book about a Victorian governess rather than a tell-all by some Swedish au pair, but if Mom still clung to that vision of her, she wasn’t going to deny her. “Yeah. I have to finish chapters nine and ten for tomorrow.”

“Are you enjoying it?” Mom asked, coming in to perch on the bed. 

Mindy rolled back over onto her stomach to let Mom’s clever fingers work their way through her hair. It was so soothing that it was probably illegal, and she stopped worrying about what she could possibly do for Valentine’s Day that would be romantic and still satisfy Mr. Secrecy. Seriously, he was suddenly acting like he was in Witness Protection, given how he’d only make out with her when no one they knew could possibly see. Maybe he was saving up all of his romantic impulses for the big day, and they’d round the bases on the sexiest night of the calendar year. “Mmmmm,” she said, losing her train of thought as Mom loosened all the knots in her hair and let it run through her fingers like silk.

*

“Where are you off to?” Danny asked, flicking the strings on her hat. “You running errands for your Ma?”

Mindy put _Jane Eyre_ in her bag on top of her calc and bio textbooks; baseball practice was pretty boring and she could use the time to get ahead in her reading. “I’m coming to watch you practice,” she said. “I haven’t done it yet this year. Why have I been depriving myself of the wonders of the Castellano ass in what are basically tights?”

“You’re what?” Danny asked, grin dropping off his face. “I gotta - come with me.”

If he was finally ready to mack on her in front of god and man and East Park, she’d follow him for days. She had a hunch she knew where they were going to end up, but she let him lead the way - his butt was pretty spectacular in jeans, too.

They ended up just where she’d guessed, in the alcove that she thought of as the puppy place, where he’d accidentally groped her boobs freshman year. It was really cold out, but she was willing to unzip her puffy jacket for a little deliberate action. He got her up against the wall and instead of leaning into her and sharing body heat, he started pacing in front of her.

“Mindy,” he said, looking at her like she was a perfect shining star. “I think we should go back to being friends.”

“What?” she asked, pushing the earflaps of her hat back, because obviously she’d misheard whatever _that_ was.

“I think we should break up,” he said.

“No - that’s not what I want -” she started, words tumbling over each other. She didn’t get what was happening. How could he go from making out with her like he ached for her to this? How long had he had this in the back of his mind? Was _this_ why he didn't want to have sex with her? “Danny -”

“I’ve been thinking about it, and you’re my best friend, you know that? The best friend I’ve ever had, and I know I'm not good enough for you. I - we’re not going to be in the same place next year, and you’re going off somewhere and I’ll still be here, and I’m going to be that thing that’s holding you back and I can’t do that.”

“What are you talking about? You’re going to Columbia, probably, and I applied there too. What if we both get in? What if we are together next year and the year after that and -”

“We won’t be,” Danny said, shaking his head. “There’s so much -”

“Why do you have to be such a pessimist?” she asked, wanting to punch him. What the hell was he talking about, that he wasn't good enough for her? “Why do you have to do this _now_? Why can’t we see where we get in and decide then?”

“It’s better this way, trust me. I’ve been thinking a lot about this. This way, we’re still friends. This way, I’ll know, when you’re home on breaks, that you’ll be happy to see me.”

“Really? That’s what you think?” She was furious, ready to spit, and she wished she could work up the nerve to just lash out, because it was either that or just break down and cry.

“Min,” he said, fidgeting, probably from the cold, but she was in no mood to be nice.

“You better go - I wouldn’t want my _friend_ to be late for practice,” she said, and Danny nodded and turned and walked away.

*

If Danny couldn’t nut up and say that he wanted to be with her, or hold her hand in public, then that was just fine. She didn’t need a boyfriend, not when she was going off to college somewhere _amazing_ , where there would be white guys by the boatload, and she could take her pick.

She hadn’t decided just how she wanted to play things - whether she’d ignore him entirely or be completely polite and friendly like it made no difference to her what he thought of her - so when he popped up like a freaking jack-in-the-box next to her locker, she was trapped.

“Hey,” he said, giving her one of those looks that made her - _used to_ make her - want to lick his eyelashes.

“Hey,” she said, pretending to be looking for something in her locker so she wouldn’t have to make eye contact for too long.

“I, uh, I wanted to know what you were doing for your birthday,” Danny said. He leaned in close and she could smell cigarette smoke on him. Whatever, it was none of her business if he wanted to start smoking again.

“Why?” she asked, her head fully inside the locker, which didn't smell much better than stale cigarette smoke. An air freshener would probably be a good investment, next time she was in Duane Reade. 

“Cause we’re friends -”

She nearly clipped the top of her head against the metal edge of the shelf. WTF, Daniel Castellano. She didn’t get dreamy about _friends_ , and she definitely never soaked Brown Bear through with tears because of _friends_. “I’ve got plans,” she said, “and now I have to go.”

She’d learned her lesson about trying to celebrate her birthday - she hadn’t had a good one since freshman year - and if there was no awesome boyfriend to kick off the tradition of hardcore birthday makeouts, then all she really wanted was for someone to make a big deal of her. 

That, she decided, walking away and leaving Danny behind, was a job for her family.

* * *

Put your big-girl panties on, she counseled herself sternly on the way to the mailbox. It seemed like everyone had already gotten their acceptances, and she was the only one without a clue where she’d be next year. Alex was ditching the east coast entirely for some Pacific school, where they probably gave you a surfboard in your orientation packet; Maggie had been recruited to Florida to chase a soccer ball for the next four years; Jeremy was going back to England, even though he said East Park had left him “woefully unprepared for the academic rigors of a proper public school,” because he was a snob and a half; and Peter was - of _course_ he was - a Dartmouth legacy. Danny . . . well, who knew where Danny was going to be. Who cared, was an even better question.

Taking a deep breath, she opened the mailbox. The universe had the same sense of humor that Danny did - i.e., none at all. All that superstitious talk about her panties had gotten her was their creepy neighbor’s _Victoria’s Secret_ catalog in their box.

She was ready to scream. Seriously, who wouldn’t want her at their school? She’d had secret visions of handwritten letters of acceptance, a bidding war between rival deans, and phone calls offering her scholarships in the field of awesomeness. All she actually had was a big fat nothing.

Mom was painting something when she walked in, and Mindy let herself be glad that at least _somebody_ was following through with their dreams. For, like, a minute, and then she was back to being pissed and depressed.

The minute Mom saw her, she started cleaning up, wiping her hands with a damp rag. “Thangam,” Mom said, grinning from ear to ear, and if she was pregnant _again_ , Mindy was going to have to sit her parents down and give them the safe-sex talk. Mom held her face in her damp hands and kissed her nose. “I put your mail in your room.” She raised her eyebrows hopefully, and Mindy felt her pulse start to speed up. “Big envelopes. They said that thick envelopes mean good news, right?”

She needed both hands to grip Mom’s arms. “Really?”

Mom had the decency to look guilty. “They came yesterday, but I wanted you to open them on your star birthday.”

Mindy didn’t want to wait to hear any more. She took off down the hall, dumping her backpack and looking at the bed, where there were four small envelopes and three big ones, fanned out. She picked up Brown Bear and looked at the little envelopes first, and that was when she got really confused, because all four were from her safety schools. What the hell - why wouldn’t _Rutgers_ want to be in the Mindy Lahiri business? Not that she wanted to be anywhere near a bunch of Harold and Kumar types for the next four years.

The big envelopes were what counted. She looked at the logos - Princeton, Dartmouth, and Yale - and reached out, running her fingers over the shiny seals. She opened Dartmouth first and read _Dear Mindy_ and _Congratulations! On behalf of the faculty and staff, it is with great pleasure that I inform you of your admission to Dartmouth as a member of the Class of 2018._ She read it again, just to make sure, and then screamed, dancing in a circle. She threw herself onto her bed and buried her face in her pillow, staying face-down and kicking her legs against the yielding softness of her mattress.

*

Dad came home late, but he’d bought jilebi for her star birthday and laddu for her college acceptances, so she could basically be riding a sugar high until graduation. Her face hurt from smiling for so long, and Dad gave her a squeeze. 

“That’s what I like to see, kondai. A smile on that face.”

“You’ve _earned_ this, Mindy,” Mom said.

God, she had the best family ever. Mindy hauled Rishi into her lap, surprised as always by how heavy he was, even though he still looked like a stick figure. He was almost _four_ now, and she was going to miss all the little day-to-day stuff he came up with from now on, like giggling and toppling over every time he tried to touch his toes while singing “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes.” How could she even consider missing any of that? Unless - unless she got into Columbia and lived at home while taking classes uptown. That was a possibility.

Rishi stayed on her lap while Mom served up masala dosai, but wouldn’t eat more than a few bites until Mom sat down and brought a tiny dosai just for him. Mindy dunked the edges of her dosai in sambar and looked over at her parents, trying to figure out what strangers must think of them, the better to hone the first impression she’d make on her college classmates. 

Dad had a broken nose - as if he’d ever been a jock at anything more impressive than table tennis - but glasses too, which more than canceled out whatever tough-guy impression he might have made. He had severely parted hair that he still slicked down with Brylcreem - he’d probably kept the company in business single-handedly. And Mom - Mom was kind of a knockout. She had shiny hair, big eyes, and dimples and definitely didn’t look like she’d pushed out two kids. Rishi had inherited the best of both of them, Dad’s curly hair and Mom’s deep brown eyes and a little cleft in his baby chin. She couldn’t actually leave them, could she?

*

She still hadn’t heard from a few of her schools - come on, Columbia, get off your ass, and Brown, just imagine how cute your orientation booklet for next year could be with a cover of Mindy Lahiri rocking a Brown baseball cap with an ironic twinkle in her eye - so she wasn’t ready to say anything to anybody yet. Nobody was paying much attention to her anyway, which, thanks a lot, jerkwads, because spring break was coming up and the baseball team was actually doing well.

Danny had talked about going for a baseball scholarship, like he was just a dumb jock with nothing else to offer, but she’d understood that he needed all the money he could get his hands on for college, so she’d put up with all of it. And now, the one season she hadn’t been in the stands for every game, eyes trained on him making himself at home on third base, was the one season the Thunder was actually winning. The conclusion was obvious: she was Danny’s bad-luck charm.

Putting it like that didn’t make it hurt any less.

She rode out the week, studiously avoiding Danny and Peter as much as she could - AP Bio made ignoring Danny especially difficult - and felt a huge weight coming off her shoulders when the last bell rang on Friday. Spring break was on, she was getting out of the city for the week with her family, and Monday was her birthday; she had only good times ahead, she was sure.

_Some_ self-fulfilling prophecies had to be good, right?

*

Rishi looked dangerously cute in his little tricorn hat, and she held onto his little hand as they threaded their way through all of the people crowded into Quincy Market. Mom and Dad were off to one side, out of the flow of foot-traffic, holding hands and acting like an educational trip was basically a second honeymoon; it was kind of disgustingly adorable, actually. 

Plus, Dad had definitely learned his lesson about vacations being relaxing experiences - there was none of that _up at six, make the most of every day_ stuff that had made the Disney World trip one of the horror highlights of her formative years. Now he was content to amble along the Freedom Trail and tell them all about what he’d read about all of the Founding Fathers. Mindy listened but kept her eyes peeled for any particularly cute tour guides.

Rishi got up on Dad’s shoulders and Mom dropped behind to slip an arm around Mindy’s waist, and Mindy turned her face up to the bright spring sunshine, happy in the knowledge that her new coat made her look like a million bucks.

*

Her big birthday dinner was at Finale, which had already done pretty well by her with the Pesto Pizza, but kicked it into high gear with the Kalamansi Cheesecake, complete with a candle. The restaurant was super-classy - no one sang, but the waiters all came out and stood in a circle around their table, applauding respectfully when she blew out the flame, like they were giving her a standing ovation just for being born. It was awesome.

Leaving the restaurant was a different story. There were so many drunk people wearing Irish green that Mom had to pick Rishi up and Dad had to steer both her and Mom on the sidewalk away from all of the partiers and their noisemakers. Mindy felt like she had a contact high from breathing in all of the alcoholic fumes they’d exhaled, but they eventually got to the hotel. She made sure Rishi brushed his teeth and got him in his pajamas and into his bed, and when he was snuggled under the covers and looking up at her, she gave in and played him “Royals,” which he’d claimed as his bedtime song a couple of weeks earlier. The kid had taste.

But no staying power - he was out like a light before the song was over. Mindy let the song finish while she piled pillows around him so he wouldn’t roll out of the bed and then checked her school email. Morgan had sent her a message asking where everybody was, rambling on about scheduling and seeing if Bones could infiltrate the school. She sighed and looked at her gmail. There were a couple of birthday messages from her family in India - why they couldn’t have been the slip-some-cash-in-a-card-and-mail-it types she would never know - plus one from Danny that she just didn’t feel up to opening.

There was a text that popped up, from Gwen, who she hadn’t talked to in about six months, since the end of the summer. _Happy birthday, Mindy! Talk soon???_ Whoa - three question marks. If there was drama coming up, she needed to be well rested, so she got into bed and turned out the lights.

* * *

Being back in school sucked the big one, because she had a raging case of senioritis and only a month to decide what the rest of her life was going to look like. Columbia - yes - and Brown - no - had sent envelopes while she’d been chillin’ in Boston, which left her with four great schools to choose between. Not that she had any of the financial aid offers yet, which, get it in gear, Ivys, money wasn’t a point of no concern to everyone.

Gwen texted again while she was in line to buy grilled cheese from the truck that was parked across the street on Mondays, and Mindy hit dial this time, because there were so many subtleties of tone that texting left out. “Long time no hear, girl!” Gwen said, sounding impossibly chipper. “Spring break, whoo!”

“ _Don’t_ tell me where you are,” Mindy said. “I am _so_ jealous.”

“So,” Gwen said, suddenly awkward, “I don’t know how to ask this without bragging.”

Ugh, so there was no drama like aliens landing in DC and taking Gwen’s new BFF, Marta - like she was a Von Trapp child or something, seriously - with them. “What’s up? You can tell me and I won’t think you’re bragging. Much.”

Gwen laughed. “I got into Princeton!”

“Whoa.” She and Gwen could be reunited as roommates - why hadn’t it occurred to her that that was a possibility?

“I know! So I wanted to know what you’ve heard from schools - you applied to Princeton too, right? - and maybe make some plans to visit? Carl says it’s gorgeous there.”

Right, Carl was still in the picture, at Princeton, so unless he had a sweet pad, being Gwen’s roommate would mean a lot of getting sexiled by a scrunchie around the doorknob.

“I got in,” she admitted, not sure why she was so reluctant to commit herself. “But I haven’t heard yet about financial aid, so I can’t decide until that happens.”

“No, I completely understand,” Gwen said, then squealed again like she couldn’t help it. “But just think about it! We could be living together in six months! I’ve missed you so much!”

“Me too,” she said, the first thing she’d said that felt absolutely right.

*

The thing was, she wasn’t sure if she wanted to have a fallback friend or if she wanted to go it completely alone. Peter had made a pretty convincing case for her to join him at Dartmouth, saying she’d be like his frat’s little sister - which was fine, as long as there was hillbilly-style boot-knocking potential with any of the particularly hot fratbros - and he’d teach her how to ski. Which, everybody knew the best part about ski weekends was scarfing down hot chocolate and making out in front of the fire, and she had mad skills in both of those areas.

“Hey, Peter!” she said, seeing his broad back in that ugly varsity jacket out of the corner of his eye. She could maybe stand to hear some more about how she’d be the darling of Dartmouth.

“Oh, hey, M,” Peter said, going totally shifty-eyed. “What up, dawg?”

“Hey, are you avoiding me?” He was doing a little side-to-side dance. “Or do you just have to pee?”

“I am _not_ discussing anything happening in my pants region with you.” He scoped out the hallway like a traffic cop and pulled her into an empty classroom. “Look, I gotta get down to the locker room for the ritual towel-snapping because Parker makes the best squeaky noises, but there’s something I have to tell you.”

It was so weird seeing Peter looking serious. “What is it?” she asked.

“So, uh, over break Danny and I went to a Yankees game. My dad’s company has a box, so we did the whole thing, waiter service, everything, and it was pretty sweet.”

“Yeah, and?”

He mumbled something, that between the speed and his terrible flat accent, was completely incomprehensible. “Peter. Use your words.”

“And my cousin Sally came, and she kissed Danny.”

Well. She’d heard him loud and clear that time. All the air got sucked out of her lungs and she was basically going to have to become a mime, because she couldn’t even speak. “Oh,” she tried to say, but nothing really came out. 

“I don’t think he kissed her back, M. Okay? I think he’s still hung up on you.”

“You can’t be hung up on someone and then _dump them._ That’s not how it works.” She needed to get out of there.

She gave Peter a look that was supposed to say _thanks_ and _you may be an idiot but I don’t blame you for your family of hussies_ , but probably didn’t communicate either of those things, if the way Peter looked so unhappy was any indication. He slung an arm around her shoulders and squeezed them really tight just for a minute. “Sorry, Mindy.”

*

“Here’s the thing,” Left Charlie said, looking all gorgeously stern, his arms crossed over his chest in a way that made his biceps really pop like a 3D movie. “If I see you pulling this shit again, I am going to write you up.”

“No, you don’t understand, there were ext- ex- circumsssances. _Expensive_ circumsssances,” Mindy slurred out. She couldn’t quite get her hand to pat his luscious bicep to reassure him, but she gave the Charlie on the left her best smile, completely dissing the Charlie on the right.

“Your parents know you went out drinking?” Right Charlie asked, and she felt the earth stop spinning on its axis. Her eyes felt like they were getting so big they’d roll right out of their sockets. “You planning on vomiting?”

Shaking her head was a bad, _bad_ idea. “No,” she whispered. 

“Okay. You sit here, let the fresh air sober you up a little. I’m gonna get you some water. Can you eat something?”

He was right, the fresh air was helping, now that she was out of the stuffy cab that Peter had shoved her into with a twenty and sitting on the front steps, the perfect place to catch a spring breeze. “I could go for another giant pretzel,” she said. The Germans had been onto something, which was surprising, given their track record; pretzels and beer were a primo combo.

Charlie laughed shortly. “I don’t get tips, I’m not taking orders. Sit tight.”

She rested her head against the stone banister and closed her eyes. Some total weirdo let his big drooly dog bound up the steps, nearly giving her a heart attack; that was why there were leash laws, to protect unsuspecting and defenseless hotties from random canine attacks. “Sorry,” the guy said, too loud because of the earbuds jammed into his weird-shaped head.

Now that she was awake again, she could hear the front door open behind her. “Here,” Charlie said, holding a cold Poland Spring bottle near her bare arm. “Drink this, eat this while you’re at it.” In his hand was one of those little packets of cheese crackers with peanut butter, which she’d only ever seen in vending machines but not in, like, real life.

“So,” he said, looming over her judgmentally, “what were these extenuating circumstances?”

She drained the bottle before trying to sit up straight and speak. “My ex,” she said. “He kissed somebody else, even though we’ve only been broken up for a little while!”

“Not cool,” Charlie said, finally sitting down next to her. “But I thought that happened months ago?”

“No,” she said, when she figured out he probably meant Cliff, “not him. The - the latest one.” The _only_ one she thought of when she thought _boyfriend_. Or, really, _ex_. God damn Danny Castellano anyway, she thought as she viciously scraped peanut butter off a cracker with her teeth.

“I think I’m supposed to say something about the sea and how there’s plenty more fish in it,” Charlie said, looking up like he could see the stars through all the light pollution. “I can take a crack at it, if you want.”

“Nah, don’t bother,” she said, tilting her head up too and nearly being blinded by the stupid streetlight. That was probably the glare she’d have gotten off of Danny’s white ass, not that she’d know, because he’d never wanted to get naked with her. She’d gone all the way with one pasty Jesus freak, so why couldn’t she do it with a second one? _This_ , she thought, pointing dramatically at the blurry streetlight, _this is why I can’t have nice things._

“Ah, kid,” she heard Charlie say, and that was when she realized she’d started crying again.

*

Peter looked kind of _where-are-they-now?_ famous in his shades, slumped against one of the brick walls of the school. “Hey,” she said, watching him pick his chin up from his chest with a deliberate slowness that had to mean he was feeling pretty rough. She didn’t feel that bad, considering - Charlie was clearly a goddamn genius with his hangover cure.

“Thought you said that was your first time getting drunk,” Peter said, sounding suspicious before smacking his mouth like he couldn’t stand the taste of his own tongue.

“It was, but I have a fairy godmother. A badass NYPD fairy godmother.” Also, she’d basically maintained a one-to-one ratio of soft salted pretzel to beer - thank god she wasn’t gluten-free - while he’d been more of an old-school pound-them-back guy.

“Listen, M,” Peter said, heaving an arm over her shoulders, “mind steering me to the nurse’s office?”

“Peter, I’m so sorry -” she said, stopping when he held up one pleading hand.

“The Chasing Amy voice is not helping _anything_ right now, a’ight? Let’s try it in silence.”

“Yeah,” she said, repeating it in a whisper when even that made him flinch.

“Whoa, let me help you with that,” Danny said, coming up on Peter’s blind side, making her flinch, and that made Peter stumble. 

“I’ve got him,” she said sharply, wrestling Peter into staying on his feet. He moaned and buried his face in her hair, and how did he not know how to handle a hangover by this time?

“You can barely handle him on these steps,” Danny said. “Come on, let me help - he’s my friend too.”

“Wow, I can’t keep track of how many friends you have, Danny. You sure are Mr. Popularity.”

Danny backed off, but he got a look on his face, a mean look, but like the one he was bullying was himself. It made no sense at all. “He’s my friend and my teammate. Coach’ll kill him for drinking when we have a game today.”

Peter dry-heaved before she could think of a response. “Just get out of the way, narc,” she said, trying to pat Peter’s arm while keeping her body out of the splatter zone. With any luck, Danny would be the one caught in the spray.

But Danny turned and left and Peter raised his head long enough to say, “You took Honors Physics, M. You should have been able to calculate the danger zone for my spewage better than _that_.”

*

Peter stayed in the nurse’s office until halfway through their bio lab period, which meant that his lab partner, Jeremy, joined her and Danny in taking notes on cellular respiration. The Alanis-style irony of it all, of course, was that it was easier to breathe around Danny when there was an intermediary there. Maybe she could become a pop sensation instead of a doctor.

Jeremy was nattering on about the oxidation of glucose, which, she thought he’d kicked sugar when he got bangably skinny again after the unfortunate weight gain junior year, so she tuned him out and thought about what sort of hot her background dancers should be. All of them would be blue-eyed, definitely, the _laser_ blue that that new Captain Kirk had.

“So you’re seeing Peter now?” Danny asked out of nowhere, pretending to measure something that she knew didn’t need measuring. “That why you wanted me to back off, so you could make time with your hungover honey?”

“What - _make time_? Uh, we’re no longer in the Great Depression, Danny, you can use slang from this century. And how dare you. It is none of your business who I’m dating.” She looked over at Jeremy, who was still talking about the lab, like, had he not realized that no one was listening to him? She dropped her voice anyway, just in case. “You said you just wanted to be friends, so you don’t get a vote on my love life.”

“As a _friend_ , I can’t tell you that you can do better?” Danny asked, sounding angry and lost, his voice rising enough that even Jeremy registered it and stopped talking about the stupid lab.

“I thought you said he was your friend too,” she said.

“He is, but you’re -”

She was what? Clearly he thought she was a mind-reader and that she’d be able to finish the sentence for herself, because he trailed off and just looked at her the way Bones probably looked at Morgan. Ew, that made her Morgan. He looked at her the way Morgan probably looked at Bones - there, that was better. Mindy sighed when he just continued to stare in silence. Of course she was going to have to be the mature one, _again_. “Thank you for your input, Danny. Now let’s talk about how cells breathe.”

And that was when Peter walked in, still looking all kinds of rough, and she smiled and made room for him at their lab bench, and Danny snapped his pencil in two like a total roided-up freak.

* * *

She probably should have gone home to start studying for her AP exams - as soon as she’d signed up for Bio and Calc, East Park had sent home these seriously beefed up study packets that made it seem like she should’ve started prepping years ago. But it was so gorgeous out, so she got a Haagen-Dazs bar and sat in the park instead, glad to be in the sunshine. Gwen had texted with vital information: there were close-ups of Channing Tatum from the set of that stripper sequel on the internet. She’d been so good about using WiFi on her phone at home so she could splurge on data when the weather finally ended her hibernation, and she sighed in happy anticipation as she clicked the link in Gwen’s text. 

“Hey, uh, Mindy,” she heard just as she was zooming in on those killer pecs, and she looked up, squinting against the bright light until Tamra moved to stand between her and the sun.

“Oh, hey, Tamra,” she said. “What’s up?”

Tamra shrugged, and slinked her way over to the bench. Seriously, the girl had, like, snake hips and she knew what looked good on her. It was _so_ weird to think that in just a few months, they’d be out of each other’s lives forever. She wondered where Tamra was going to go, what she wanted to be. “I just thought I’d say hi. You don’t come to the baseball games anymore.”

“Nope,” Mindy agreed. “Ha, grew out of that phase.” Ugh, that was so not smooth, but she hadn’t exactly been expecting Tamra, of all people, to blindside her about stupid Danny. “Isn’t there a game today - shouldn’t you be out there cheering on Ray Ron?”

Tamra sucked her teeth like even hearing her loser boyfriend’s name was too irritating for words, which was basically what Mindy had tried to tell her, like, _ages_ ago. “Like Ray Ron’s doing anything for that game except riding the pine.”

Whoa. That sounded super-dirty - Mindy suddenly remembered that the blue-eyed Captain Kirk was named something Pine, and riding the Pine sounded like a highly worthwhile activity, but not even for those eyes would she be sloppy seconds after _Ray Ron_. Anyway, that probably wasn’t what Tamra had meant; even if the words made no sense, there was such a thing as _tone_. “Right,” she said.

Tamra looked at her for a long minute, then shook her head. “You don’t even know.”

“Know what?” she called, but Tamra had already gotten up and walked away. Rude, but at least it left her alone to consider once more Magic Mike’s formidable body.

*

Mindy lay back on her bed, marveling at how awesome her life was that those mighty glutes were _not_ the best thing she’d seen all day. That honor had to go to her financial-aid packets from Princeton and Dartmouth, both of which had come through in a big way. Columbia had offered to loan her two thousand dollars a year, which, as far as she could see, wouldn’t even cover her meal plan, and Yale just hadn’t sent her any kind of packet at all, so screw them.

Her growling stomach reminded her that she’d missed lunch due to Bio lab - why she couldn’t miss Gym once a week was beyond her - and there was probably something delicious to snack on, and if she couldn’t sneak any of that, she’d settle for an apple or something Mom-approved. Rishi was sitting on his booster seat at the kitchen table, emphatically coloring in a picture of the Hulk from the _Avengers_ coloring book she’d gotten him from the street vendor next to her favorite hot-dog cart. Rishi’s Hulk was blue and yellow, an interesting choice, or maybe he was so advanced he knew that those two colors together made green. That was probably it, because she couldn’t be the only genius in her family. Mom and Dad might have had an arranged marriage, but those were some killer genes they were combining.

Rishi let her work on the background of his picture while he continued to show a kind of alarming intensity with respect to coloring in the Hulk’s musculature, so she was idly giving the sky an apocalyptic orange shade when Dad came in, setting his briefcase down and taking his shoes off at the door before padding into the kitchen, his toes flexing like usual.

“Dad!” she said, kissing his cheek and making sure she was the one who gave him his chai - when asking for a favor, it never hurt to stack the deck.

“Yes, kondai?” Dad said, smiling at Mom like he knew something was up. Okay, fine, so her parents were geniuses too.

“It’s looking like Princeton or Dartmouth, and I’ll probably need a license so that I can share driving duties with someone to come home for breaks, so that means I need to learn how to drive, and you could teach me, right?” She said it all in one breath, careful not to hint that surely she should get a car too. Even with the financial aid, that was going to be a serious chunk of change they were dropping on her college education, and most places probably wouldn’t let freshmen have cars anyway.

Dad and Mom shared another long look - like, were they communicating telepathically? - and Dad said quietly, “Of course. We’ll go Saturday morning,” while Mom brushed by both of them, scooping Rishi up and vanishing down the hallway.

“What’s up with Mom? Where are we gonna go on Saturday?” she asked while Dad took a long contemplative sip of his chai. 

“We all need a little time to get used to the idea of your being so far away, thangam,” he said, leaning against the counter and setting his mug down.

She pushed her way into his arms and hugged him. New York would definitely decrease in fabulousness without her, but she’d be back for Thanksgiving. And, anyway, she was going no more than a few states away - her parents had moved halfway around the world when they were only a couple of years older than she was now. She could be brave too.

*

So driving wasn’t something that came _super_ -naturally to her - Dad had done a lot of deep, calming breaths as he tried to explain the geometry behind parallel parking - but she knew she was smart and motivated enough to calm her tits and not pull a _Clueless_ when the big day came. Plus, she wasn’t a virgin, so she was already one up on Cher Horowitz.

Honestly, _this_ would probably be the hardest part, braving the hellhole on 34th Street known as the DMV (probably the inspiration for all the evil parts of _The Lord of the Rings_ ,where Orlando Bloom and his beautiful hair should never have had to venture) to schedule her driver’s test. Ugh, it was so gross in there, with all of the pens on chains and the drones who were so busy scratching their polyester-wrapped asses they couldn’t even do their jobs. But she’d picked the outfit that would be immortalized on her license too well to mess it all up; she aced the written test and passed the road test with points to spare, even though the test car handled like a tank that had been through a couple of warzones. 

She texted a picture of herself holding up her brand-new license to Peter, who sent back _Go, girl!_ ten seconds later. Didn’t he have a game? For playoffs or regionals or something like that? Now that was a real friend - putting her first even when he probably had to catch an RBI or whatever.

_You’re the best_ she texted back. _Gooooo Thunder!_

*

Charlie was sitting on the front steps when she got home, his hands wrapped around a mug the size of his head. His eyes were closed, so she took the opportunity to do a little ogling. It was probably her civic duty, right, to appreciate those who protected and served.

His long legs were bent, like he could launch himself off the steps to take down a bad guy, and those were some actual biceps straining the sleeves of his Fun Run t-shirt. Even with his eyes closed and tired lines on his face, he seemed alert to danger.

And to being ogled. Those eyes slid open as a smile stretched his face. “Hey, kid, you being good?”

It took her a second to realize what he was talking about. “Totally soberino,” she said. “And I _won’t_ ” - she whipped out her new license - “be drinking and driving.”

“Hey, congrats,” he said, lifting his gargantuan mug in a toast to her. “You getting a car?”

“Why, did you hear anything?” Charlie and her parents sometimes talked at the mailboxes, right? Or when they were setting out trash and recycling?

“Nah, didn’t mean to get your hopes up,” he said, laughing.

“What was your first car?” she asked, smoothing down her skirt so she could sit on the step next to him.

“It was a real beater,” he said, whatever that meant. “Gorgeous when I got done working on her,” which, come on, was basically giving her fantasy material for _life_. Charlie at eighteen, smeared with grease, working in a white tank top and faded jeans, holding a wrench while he wiped the sweat off his face with his forearm.

“Uh-huh,” she said, biting her lip and trying to follow along.

* * *

Thank god that Peter showed up at her door first, holding up a paper bag of bagels that smelled fantastic. “Who let you in?” Mindy asked, still holding some of Rishi’s toys that she’d been clearing off the living room floor.

“Some lady with, like, Marge Simpson hair was walking out when I came up the steps.”

“Amelia,” Mindy said, identifying her neighbor immediately. “Green would be so much better for her than blue.” She dropped Rishi’s stuff in the toy-chest in the corner and led the way to the kitchen. “My mom made chai, or there’s instant coffee?”

“Chai sounds good,” Peter said, handing over the bag of bagels. She poured him a cup and dug through the bag, looking for a sesame bagel. “Grab me a poppy-seed?”

“Yeah,” she said, and put them in the toaster. “I can’t believe there’s only a month until the AP exams. We have to have the most amazing study session ever.”

“Chill. You know all of it because you’ve been paying attention all year,” Peter said, leaning forward with his forearms on the kitchen counter. “What I can’t believe is that we’re still in the playoffs and that our senior quotes are due on Friday.”

Great, one more thing she needed to be totally on top of. “Yeah, someone dropped the ball - last year’s seniors had to have them in before spring break.” Casey’s had been some Bible thing about lepers or something, which, seriously? There had been no way to spin that into a cry of longing to get back together with her. “What are you using?” she asked, suddenly curious.

“I haven’t narrowed it down yet. Why, you need some help? Use a Dr. Seuss quote.”

“Not a stoner.”

“Female poet?”

“Not a lesbo.”

“Damn, that’d be hot,” Peter said.

“Perv!” she said, smacking his shoulder. “But, like, totally.” The bagels popped up, so she got out some plates. “Grab a knife from that drawer?”

She grabbed the cream cheese and the margarine from the fridge, and he immediately went for the cream cheese. “I bet Jeremy’s gonna use Shakespeare for his.”

“Ugh, totally. What about Danny?”

“I bet it’s gonna be Springsteen lyrics,” Peter said, sliding the cream cheese her way. He’d clearly heard a _lot_ about the wonders of St. Bruce in the locker room; she wondered if the lecture Danny had given him had been updated since she last heard it.

“Wait, there are actual lyrics to Springsteen songs?” she asked. “I thought he just grunted stuff and, like, shredded his axe or whatever.”

“Hnn, hnggg, nnnhhhhhhhhg!” Peter air-jammed, making her laugh.

Mindy was chewing her first bite when the intercom beeped. The monitor showed a tiny black-and-white Danny and Jeremy standing on the stoop, so she buzzed them in.

They were still taking off their shoes when Peter came out of the kitchen with his chai. “Maybe I should just have the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium equation as my quote,” she said.

“That’d be pretty sweet. You could look back at the yearbook and be all, ‘AP Bio - good times,’” Peter said. “Oh, dog, did you want me to take my shoes off?”

She sort of nodded, taking his mug when he thrust it at her. Danny narrowed his eyes at her. “Hi, Mindy.”

“Hey, Danny. Heeeeyyy, Jere-bear.”

“I have asked you repeatedly not to call me that,” Jeremy said with a way melodramatic sigh, but he followed her into the kitchen. “Oh, lovely, lovely carbs,” he said, seeing the bagels on the counter, pulling an everything bagel out of the heap and smelling it as his eyes rolled back in his head orgasmically. What a weirdo.

The coffee table in the living room was big enough to hold all of their books and notes and lab reports plus their food, so they sat on the floor in a ring around it. Mindy spent the first half hour or so obsessively tracking the space between Danny’s thigh and her own and scooching microscopically closer to Peter every time Danny shifted, but soon enough the sheer volume of stuff they had to know for the AP Bio exam overwhelmed her and she put stupid, hot Danny out of her mind. They actually got through a third of the study guide before Mom and Dad came home with Rishi from an outing at the zoo.

Rishi charged over to her and Mom asked, “Are you going to take a break to eat, or are you done for the day? I can cook something.”

There was a pause, all of them watching Rishi saying, “Monkey, monkey,” while climbing her like one. She tickled him, just a little bit, and he giggled and sat in her lap. 

“We can pick this up tomorrow at my flat,” Jeremy finally said. “After church,” he said, obviously for Danny’s benefit.

“A’ight,” Peter said, which made Danny stop looking at Rishi and get that pissed-off look again. What was his problem?

*

It would have been more awkward to argue about it, so she and Danny walked out of Jeremy’s apartment together, heading for the subway station. “I think we’ve covered the whole study guide,” Danny said, his hand at the small of her back as they walked to the front of the platform. “Now all that’s left are the labs.”

She couldn’t help shrugging his hand away. He didn’t mean anything by it - it was just a reflex for him - but it was torture for her.

“What?” he asked, sounding sad. “Min, aren’t we ever gonna be friends again?”

“I don’t know,” she said, just as the 6 squealed to a halt on the track. She hadn’t even heard her own answer, so there was no way he would have.

He didn’t get on the train with her, and she panicked for a second before remembering he needed the E, that he’d stayed with her so she wouldn’t be alone with the homeless people in the mostly deserted station. She wanted, even more than usual, to kiss him senseless. More than that, though, she missed her friend Danny, who smiled at her in a way no one else did.

She couldn’t believe he’d turned her into one of those people who cried on the subway, and she wasn’t even a pretty crier. Fucking Danny.

* * *

The first thing she did when she opened her locker on Monday and saw the note was to text Gwen. Now that they’d agreed to room together at Princeton they were back in constant contact, and it felt like the years since Gwen had moved had all been a bad dream.

_I’ve got the moves, baby, you’ve got the motion . . . let’s cause a commotion at the prom._

WTF. Did she even know any dudes who could quote vintage Madonna from the days before she decided she was British? The handwriting was basic caps, right out of a kidnappers’ manual.

_Got a stalker or a secret admirer_ she texted to Gwen. _Advice???_

_Keep your eyes open and tell me everything._

Yeah, she so wasn’t going to hand all of the clues over to Gwen without doing some investigating of her own. Sad as it was to eliminate him, it probably wasn’t Jeremy, because he hated anyone who put on a phony British accent. When they’d taken a study break just yesterday - he shouldn’t have had a ninety-inch flatscreen if he didn’t want people to use it - and stumbled on some shady, cut-rate _Behind the Music_ exposé on Madonna, he’d started bellowing before she’d finished her first sentence. “Where does she think she’s supposed to be from? Cornwall by way of Cumbria?” he’d asked, clutching his hair in what looked like real anguish. So the secret admirer thing was totally dramatic enough for him, but the actual message took him out of the running.

It was kind of a shame, because Jere-bear was looking pretty good these days.

Wait. Double WTF. WTFF. They hadn’t even announced the prom theme yet, had they?

*

The prom banner was unfurled at lunch. _CiTY oF RoMaNCe_ , it said, and _there_ was the ransom-note aesthetic that had been sorely missing from the note in her locker. Was _everyone_ on the student council high?

Morgan, still on his stepladder, was sounding out the words on the banner he’d just hung. Danny was talking to Jeremy about something mind-numbing, Tamra was doing a Google Images search for nail art, and Peter was sighing into his jello.

“You got a skank lined up for this thing?” Mindy asked when she couldn’t stand watching him make the green cubes jiggle any longer. There was something so unsettling about the way that stuff moved, and it had to be cruel and unusual punishment to give it to people trapped in hospital beds who were probably going out of their minds anyway.

“No. There’s not gonna be a skank.”

“You can’t skip our senior prom!” she protested, even though she wasn’t sure if she was going to go herself. A secret admirer was great in theory, but what if he turned out to be totally gross? Or, worse, someone playing a prank? “You’re, like, Mr. Prom!”

“But I want to go with a girl I’ll remember. Like, I don’t want to be looking at pictures on my hologram visor when I’m a hundred and ten and totally blank on the name of whatever butterface is on my arm.”

“Peter,” she said, “that was almost sweet.”

“Whatever,” he said, standing up to bus his tray.

*

_You could be my dancing queen. Meet me at the prom._ Okay, whoever this dude was, he was really good at keeping his identity a secret. OMG, what if it wasn’t a dude? She was _not_ down for experimenting at her senior prom, on what was supposed to be the most epically romantic night of her life. Even if, as Peter had said, it would be totally hot for her to be smooching up a storm with some girl.

Wait. What if it was Peter? He’d been griping about wanting a real connection with a girl for what seemed like _weeks_ now, and he was sticking to her like a siamese twin whenever Danny and Jeremy joined them for study sessions. He already knew she was a killer prom date. Plus, he’d seen her moves again in the Cliff aftermath - ooh, maybe it was Cliff, looking to get her back! Damn it, there were too many hot guys around all wanting a piece of the Mindy action to narrow it down.

She fluffed her hair, checking the mirror in her locker, and put the note back where she’d found it, half-hidden in the pocket of her totally cute jean jacket.

*

“It is just now occurring to me,” Mindy said, tucking her phone against her cheek as she flipped through all the outfits hanging in her closet and wishing she had that _Clueless_ computerized wardrobe, “that this guy must be a total cheapskate. I mean, ‘Meet me at the prom’? That’s basically like, ‘I’m not paying for your ticket or your limo or anything.’ Right?”

“Wrong,” Gwen sighed. “This is _totally_ romantic, Mindy! It’s going to be like the end of _Sixteen Candles_ \- all the people in the way will just fade away and you’ll see him standing there, waiting for you, _looking_ at you like you’re the only thing that matters.”

“Um, I think you saw a different version of _Sixteen Candles_ than I did. It ends with them making out over a cake. Which would totally work for me.”

Gwen laughed. “I’ll bring a cake the day we move into our dorm room, and we can make out over it if you want. In the meantime, you still don’t know who this guy could be?”

“Yeah, I’ve got lots of free time to go Miss Marpling,” Mindy said, trying to remember which of her button-downs had the really irritating care tag.

“No, seriously.”

“Seriously. It could be Jeremy, if the Madonna ref was just a red herring. Or Morgan, because he likes to call me his queen. Or,” she hesitated, not sure why Peter wasn’t an option she wanted to throw into the ring, “or, I guess it could be Peter?”

“Oh!” Gwen said, sounding surprised. “Do you want it to be?”

Mindy lay back on her bed, trying to imagine Peter holding her, kissing her, looking at her like she was magic. It didn’t work.

She tried again. She’d made out with Peter before, so there were actual memories to draw from, but still, she couldn’t get a single tingle out of any of it. “No,” she said at last. “Not like that. But, I have to say, as a bro, he’s unparalleled.”

“I hope you don’t break his heart,” Gwen, that big sap, said, like she had no idea how many guys would have offed Carl in a hot second if it meant a chance to be with her.

“Yeah, yeah. Carl better be doing something amazing for your prom.”

“He’s got finals that day, but he swears he’s coming down.”

Mindy had no idea how Gwen did that, staying so positive about a total dweeb who wasn’t even around most of the time, who wasn’t there to hold her when she was sad or happy or just plain horny. At least, though, Gwen knew what Carl sounded like when he said he loved her, and how it felt when he kissed her like he never wanted to kiss anyone else. 

Danny had never given her that. Maybe if he had, she’d be over him by now.

* * *

“I don’t want to be a doctor,” Mindy protested. “I was just kidding about that. Ha ha ha ha.”

Peter got a firmer grip on her left arm, Jeremy grabbed her right, and Danny pushed from behind. “We are taking this test, brah,” Peter said. “And we are gonna kick some serious AP ass.”

Okay, fine, they had a point, but that didn’t give them the right to wrinkle her lucky outfit. She shrugged free of all of them. “Yeah, we are!” she said, shooting a fist in the air like a superbrainy, superhot cheerleader. What, she had the pleated skirt and everything.

She settled at the desk she’d been assigned, making sure it didn’t rock too much on the uneven floor of the gym. She turned to see all three of them in a row next to her, and everything - all the nervousness, all the wondering - disappeared in that moment. Mindy flashed them a smile and whispered “Good luck!” None of them could manage a smile back, but that was okay, because she _had_ this.

The test booklet landed on her desk, and she breathed deep. “You may begin,” she heard, and flipped it open.

_1\. How many CO2 molecules are produced from the citric acid cycle per acetyl CoA?_

Oh, yeah, she totally had this.

*

“And the Calc exam was no problem,” Mindy said. “I mean, it’s just math, there’s nothing really to memorize - you just have to know how to solve the problems.”

“Which you did,” Gwen said on the other end of the line, sounding amused.

“Of course I did. It’s not like I was listening to Ms. Beller all year because I like the sound of her voice - oh my god, I’m hanging up now so that we can FaceTime.”

“Mindy -” Gwen said before the call ended. She did not look amused when she accepted the video call. “What’s going on?”

“So I’m prom-dress shopping -” Mindy began, pausing so that the outraged look on Gwen’s face could get full airtime. “Yeah, the last note the Mystery Dude left wasn’t really a note so much as it was a ticket to the prom.”

“Eeeeeeeeeee!” Gwen said, clapping her hands excitedly.

“Exactly. So now it’s on me to step it up and find the perf dress. And . . . this might be it?” She swung the phone over to the foamy-pink number she’d seen from across the store.

“Huh,” Gwen said. “It’s not . . . grabbing me?”

“Also, it’s a size two,” Mindy said, disappointed.

“Well, what are you looking for? Strapless, backless, floor-length, what?”

“I don’t know. Just the perfect dress that I can magically afford.”

“Wait, go back to the rack you just passed,” Gwen directed.

“Ugh, I am not wearing turquoise lace,” she grumped. “Although . . .”

“No, not that one! Go past all the lace ones. There, what do you think about that?”

The black dress with a pink underskirt was not doing anything for her. “It’s okay. Also a size two.” It was like there was a conspiracy or something. She wandered around the store, waiting for something to catch her eye, and then - there it was.

“YES,” Gwen said.

“YES,” Mindy responded. The size was right, the price was right, now all she needed was to try it on and make sure this wasn’t just a dream.

*

“Okay, I kind of forgive the student council for getting their act together so late,” Mindy said to the girl next to her in the ladies’ room. “This hotel is _slammin’_.”

“It really is,” the girl said, and Mindy stopped worrying about whether her mascara was running, because she knew that voice and just. _No way._ Who knew Betsy had a body like that? “You look great, Mindy!”

“Uh, thanks. You too!” She watched Betsy fuss with her updo for a couple of minutes, but the suspense was killing her. “Who’re you here with?”

Betsy blushed, like saying his name was the same as getting it on with him in the back of the limo. Though maybe the new and improved Betsy’d done that too. “ _Jeremy_ ,” she breathed, all reverent.

“Jeremy _Reed_?”

Betsy was too overcome to do anything but nod and float out of the lounge, and Mindy watched her go, crossing one name off of her list of people who could be Mystery Dude.

She crossed Morgan off next, seeing him from behind, leaning over someone she couldn’t see due to his big, bulky body. So there _were_ dudes who were not improved by tuxes. Good to know. She just hoped the person he was with wasn’t his grandmother, but she really wouldn’t put it past him. No, wait, he wasn’t a student, so he had to be here with someone who was.

Oh, the hell with it - it was going to drive her crazy, not knowing, so she headed over to him. “Hey, Morgan, and - Tamra! What the HELL?” Tamra made that I’m-through-playing face, so Mindy backed up one judicious step. “What the hell are you wearing that you look so great!” she said. Way to save the day, brain.

“You look good too,” Tamra said, before drawing Morgan away by the hand. His face lit up with a dopey grin that he aimed vaguely in Mindy’s direction before allowing himself to be dragged off to the dance floor.

Okay, so: world shattered. When she’d counseled Tamra on moving on from Ray Ron, she’d meant that the new guy should be a step _up_. Whatever, it wasn’t her fate to have to deal with Morgan and the dog hair he was probably getting all over Tamra’s sequined dress. Mindy pulled her silver wrap more closely around her bare shoulders and kept moving.

An arm around her waist nearly pulled her off her feet. She gasped and looked up and it was Peter. “Damn, girl, you look _hot_ ,” he said, which meant that she was going to have to try extra-hard to let him down gently.

“Hey, Peter,” she said, aiming her gaze at his third button, because she wasn’t about to watch his heart break when she told him she wasn't up for a grand romance with him. It struck her that the button kept moving - because he was moving, doing this weird side-to-side shifty dance. When she looked up, she saw his eyes were doing the same thing, even though they were aimed at the entrance of the ballroom. “Are you waiting for something?” she asked. God, what if he had some big romantic spectacle planned?

“My date,” he said, which made no sense. She was already here, standing right in front of him. He had a corsage box in one of his hands, and she could see, finally, that the white orchid with plum-colored spots wouldn’t match her dress at all - he really wasn’t Mystery Dude either.

“Your date?” she asked, chipper again. “Miss Not-a-Butterface?”

“Awww, yeah,” he said, straightening up. “Quick, tell me I’m handsome.”

“You are super-handsome, mister,” she said, straightening his bowtie and giving him a pat on the ass as he walked off to meet a girl in a plum-colored gown. That girl looked _really_ familiar. Not just to her, either; a bunch of people were taking pictures of her on their phones. OMG, it was her hair idol - Nicoletta Babbington, who played the sexy eighteen-year-old mountain climber on that incest show on HBO, which Mindy knew about entirely through gifs from the _Vulture_ website, because _of course_ her parents wouldn’t let her watch anything that would actually allow her to keep up with what was trending on Twitter. Nicoletta ignored all of the cameras and held out her hand to Peter so he could put the corsage on her wrist, smiling when he kissed her cheek. 

Good for Peter, she thought, willing herself not to cry just because all of the decent possibilities for Mystery Dude were gone, and she was clearly about to be left to the mercies of, like, Parker or some mouth-breather. Over on the far side of the ballroom, she could see French doors opening out onto a terrace, and thought fresh air might be the best idea she could have at this point.

People seemed to melt away in front of her as she threaded through the crowd. And then she looked up and there, on the terrace, looking right at her, was Danny.

*

She couldn’t breathe - it was like there was something huge sitting on her chest, freezing her and threatening to turn her into shards. Danny could not be Mystery Dude. Could. Not.

She’d just barely come to terms with the idea that she’d loved him more than he’d ever cared for her, but that didn’t mean she was going to be okay with the fact that he’d staged this whole thing just to get her to talk to him again. She turned and gave herself one second to gulp in some air before heading back into the ballroom.

He got his hands around her shoulders - where had her wrap gone? - before she could take that step. She could feel a cold sting against her left shoulder, and his mouth was against her ear, murmuring, “Please, Mindy. Please stay.”

She wriggled free, her elbow catching his side, and she turned to see him clutch his side as pain streaked across his face. “What is it?”

“Collision at home plate yesterday - it feels like a car hit me,” he said.

“Oh. Well, I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, bending down to pick up her wrap, which had fluttered to the ground.

“If you don’t want me to be in pain, all you have to do is stay and hear me out,” he said, and that was the thing with Danny - he always knew how to get past her defenses, and she hated that it was so easy for him to do it.

“Fine. What?”

He took a deep breath. “I was wrong. You were right. I _did_ want to stay your friend - you really are my best friend, Min - but I also just plain _wanted_ you and I was too much of a coward to admit it.”

Great. As good as it had been to hear those words, it wasn’t like they washed away all of the pain she’d felt since their DL breakup. She’d legit cried over him. 

He was doing that standing-there-in-silence thing again, like he shouldn’t have to say anything else, and her heart, which had been tiptoeing cautiously up, sank back down. “Got it. Thank you for telling me.”

“Min,” he said, charging forward and kissing her.

“No -” she said, pulling her mouth free of his. “That doesn’t fix anything. God, can’t you read the signs?”

“Can you?” he asked, holding up his left hand, where _what the fuck_ it looked like there was a wedding ring circling his finger. Wait. It was his middle finger. At that point she was so confused that if he’d peeled off his face to reveal that he was secretly Cthulhu, she’d have rolled with it.

In his right hand he held out a matching ring to her. It wasn’t a perfect circle, and she peered more closely at it. That was her earring. They were both her silver hoop earrings that she thought she’d lost forever ago. “You left them at my house over Christmas,” Danny said, “and I didn’t want to give them back, give you up.”

“Thief,” she said.

He didn’t smile at that, but he paused like he was thinking about it. “Mindy, I love you. I’m so sorry I ever told you anything different.”

She looked at him, Danny Castellano, man of her dreams, looking back at her and saying the words. “Now? Present tense? You love me now?”

“Yes,” he said. “I love you.”

“Why do you have to be so dramatic about everything, Danny,” she said, starting to cry. 

“Hey,” he said, catching her head in his hands, “I thought you’d appreciate the big cinematic reveal.” She started to laugh with tears still streaming down her face, which meant she probably looked like a demented, giggling raccoon.

Danny kissed her again anyway, and it was so good, feeling his plush lips on hers, the assured swipes of his tongue in her mouth, his fingers on the back of her neck. She pushed forward, backing him into the thick stone balustrade, and he pulled away. “Whoa, hey, wait,” he said. “I don’t want this falling over.”

Wait, what? “You don’t want what falling over?” she asked, stopping short when she saw that he’d pulled a velvety pouch off the balustrade. “What is that?”

“Not a corsage,” he said. “That whole secret-notes thing meant I had no idea what color flower to get you.” He ran his eyes approvingly over her clingy midnight-blue dress with the silver sparkles running through it. “But I knew you’d be wearing your M necklace because you said it’s your ‘signature piece,’ and I knew you’d have your hair down because you get a headache when it’s pinned up for too long. So I brought you this instead.”

Inside the drawstring pouch was a silver tiara that he set gently on her head. “Told you you were my queen,” he said.

“ _Dancing_ queen, you said,” she responded, taking his hand for the real test - being seen together by all of their classmates; the terrace wasn’t exactly private, but no one else was out there.

“Wait,” he said, putting the second hoop earring around her ring finger. “I want everybody to know you’re mine.”

He turned to lead her off the terrace and she admired the lines of his shoulders and back while slipping the earring off her finger - she didn't need to look like a hillbilly child-bride - and fastening it around her necklace instead.

*

No one had moves like Danny Castellano, which meant that a ring of people formed around them, just watching them dance. It was exhilarating, and she could feel herself smiling as wide as Danny was. He looked about a hundred times happier than she’d ever seen him, his tux jacket off as he sweated through his shirt, one arm slung around her waist to keep her close.

Well, nobody had moves like her either, so she drew his head down and gave him another spectacular kiss.

* * *

Seriously, classes after AP exams and the prom had come and gone were a total waste. Or they would have been, if Danny hadn't livened things up by smiling like a lunatic through Bio and Calc and macking on her like Mr. Hormones when they had to haul ass from one end of the school to the other in the three-minute intervals between classes. The really weird thing was, no one seemed to think this was in any way out of character for Old Man Castellano, like he'd always been crazy for her and he'd just quit hiding it.

That thought kept her warmer than his letterman jacket, which he'd draped over her shoulders like it wasn't already late May and unseasonably sticky. Danny was such a dummy sometimes. 

*

"Busted," Mindy whispered triumphantly when Danny got pulled out of History to have a talk with his guidance counselor.

"For what?" he asked as he picked up his backpack. "Anything I was doing you were too."

"OMG, are you seriously throwing me under the bus?"

"What bus?"

"Just go, traitor," she said, turning back to the movie that Mr. Choi was playing even though it featured no eye candy whatsoever and was all about some seriously boring battle.

Danny came back before either side even won the battle, and it was as dark as the terrible shades on the windows could make it, so Mindy couldn't see Danny's face. 

"What?" she asked. It couldn't be real trouble, not if he came back so soon.

Danny just reached out and fumbled for her hand.

When the bell rang and Mr. Choi turned the lights back on, she looked immediately over at Danny, who was grinning big at her. "I got the Bell Scholarship."

She gasped. "Columbia?"

"Yeah," he said, and kissed her right there even with his desk in the way. "I'm going to Columbia. I can afford it if I live at home."

"I totally called this, like, six months ago," she reminded him.

"I know," he said. "You win."

"You should probably get used to saying that," she said, leaning forward to kiss him again, but then Mr. Choi pointedly cleared his throat like the sight of young love did nothing for him.

*

She wore the silver hoop earrings to graduation just to make Danny smile. It totally worked, but his smile got even bigger when he saw Rishi running toward them after the ceremony, Danny's varsity jacket streaming out behind him like it was his own personal superhero cape.

Rishi caught her around the knees and Danny steadied her with an arm around her. Rishi squeezed once and took off back toward Mom; Dad was still taking pictures like someone might die if every moment wasn't fully documented. Mindy looked around and saw Peter taking selfies with anyone who stood still for long enough and getting creative with the tassels. She rolled her eyes but couldn't help grinning at him.

Jeremy was squeezing through the rows of folding chairs. "Does no one in New York understand the social contract inherent in RSVPs?" Jeremy demanded. 

"How can you be stressed about your party when it hasn't even started?" Danny asked, which, really, he should have known better than to give Jeremy an opportunity to rant.

"Because nine out of ten of these savages did not bother responding to my invitations, which includes the two of you."

"Oh, we'll totally be there, Jere-bear," Mindy said, just to watch him huff indignantly that she hadn't, like, curtsied and presented her answer on parchment wrapped up in a bow. Danny's arm around her tightened like he wanted to laugh but was nice enough not to do it Jeremy's face.

It was kind of weird to think that she wouldn't see Jeremy's pinchy little face every day from now on, that soon they'd all be at different schools with different people. She was legit going to miss his weird Britishness and Peter's fratbro charms.

And hell to the no on missing Danny. She wasn't letting him get far enough away to miss.

*

"Danny," she said, her breath catching in her throat. When he'd said they needed to do something before heading to Jeremy's party, she'd thought he meant grabbing slices or running an errand or something. Not this. Not taking her to the top of the Empire State Building like he'd been listening every time she'd talked about _Sleepless in Seattle_.

"Jeez, what a view," he said, the wind pushing through his hair. She let her fingers follow.

"You've never been up here before?"

"Nah, I was waiting until I could take Ms. Most Likely To Succeed," Danny said, looping his arms around her waist.

"Never speak to me of the Nerd Awards again," she said, leaning back enough to fix him with some truly intense eye contact.

"Hey, an award's an award," Danny said, all gracious because he got Student-Athlete of the Year, tied with Shalita Foxx.

"Hey, Danny," she said, cuddling in closer. "Shut up and kiss me." His mouth was hot and wet against hers, and he turned them so it was her back that was up against the balustrade and she could feel a cool breeze against her neck. They were on top of the most romantic building in the world, in the greatest city in the world, together all the way. 

Mindy felt a tap on her shoulder.

Some rando family, all of them wearing truly tragic kneesocks, was looking hopefully at her when she dragged her mouth away from Danny's. "Would you take our picture, please?" the bearded one asked.

Just because she was of Asian descent didn't mean she had a lock on all technology, and the camera the guy held out had tons of buttons on the back but none on top, and she couldn't figure out what she was supposed to press. Could they not have invested in a selfie stick and left her to make out with her boyfriend?

"Yeah, sure," she said, and pressed a bunch of the buttons, more interested in watching Danny wipe lipgloss off his mouth than whether the hippies were in focus.

"We love New York!" the smallest and possibly oldest one said as he reclaimed the camera.

"Me too," Danny chimed in. Mindy poked him; he should know better than to encourage weirdos. "Hey!" he protested, squirming as he waved them off. He turned to her, brushing the hair back from her face. "You wanna head over to Jeremy's or stay here and be Meg Ryan some more?"

"Meg Ryan's not even Meg Ryan anymore, since the plastic surgery and ill-advised fling with Russell Crowe," she pointed out. Danny rolled his eyes at her. "Yeah, okay, let's go. We shouldn't deprive Jere-bear of his guests of honor." Despite her words, she couldn't quite bring herself to peel away from the railing and leave that enchanted space. "Hey, remember last time we went to a Jere party, you laid a pretty crappy kiss on me?"

Danny flushed but stepped closer so his feet were planted between her own. "I can do better," he promised, his voice low and shivery.

"Don't I know it," she said, drawing him in again.

The amazing thing about New York was that, no matter which way you looked, you could see that famous skyline. Even when you were in a building that was part of it, there was so much more, all around you, and Mindy kissed Danny at the top of the Empire State Building like it was the last scene of an epic romcom - or maybe the beginning of an even better movie about her awesome life.


End file.
